ANNIVERSARY Countdown (Count-Up?)

Today is Friday, March 7th, 2014. We were married 986 days ago, on June 25th, 2011.


Sunday, April 21, 2013

The Number of the Beast

When I lived in San Luis Obispo, I came across a 'zine written by a young woman who sold them for a buck at the weekly street fair.  Like all intelligent young people, she was bored by her community and looking for something new; her publication was entitled "667 — The Town Next to Hell."

As of today, we've been married 666 days, which is as we all know, "the number of the beast" as foretold in the Book of Revelation.  Ominous?  Well, arithmetically, it isn't a very interesting number aside from repeating digits.  It's 2*3*3*37.  Although it is exactly three times Room 222, the hyper-earnest 1969-1974 ABC high school drama.  Probably lots of people thought that a Black high school history teacher was a sign of the end times...

    
But there's a new book by Princeton religious historian and former MacArthur Fellow Elaine Pagels that explains the Book of Revelation as a sort of large allegory for the tensions in the first century AD between those who believed that Christianity was a form of Judiasm, and those who believed that Gentiles should also be welcomed.  From the New Yorker review, the 666 "almost certainly refers—by way of Gematria, the Jewish numerological system—to the contemporary Emperor Nero."

So Happy Nero Day to us.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

What are your words for peace?


Where are you as you are reading this? What is the light outside your window? What are the sounds and the smells?

H and I are trained in professional fields that look at the role of the environment (physical, social, political and economic) in shaping us—what we think and feel and do—and in understanding the reciprocal process of how we shape the environment. But there is something of a personality quirk that makes this more than a professional endeavor. I am hard wired to look at “place”—the way we remember smells from childhood-- the tastes of Fish Friday or the 100 day celebration; the way we found a place to hide or to spend with friends when we were children; the part of the house or the landscape that was our friend or teacher or our muse (the basement, the banister, the backyard, the bush), and yes, the places that frightened us. I am hard wired to try to understand how those places we remember, and the ones we experience every day are linked to what we love (and fear) about the places in our lives, and how we share them with others with different remembered patterns.

And so as I sit at the west facing window, and watch squirrels at the feeder to the north, I am submerged in other worlds-- the world that we have created here, a world of 87 countries and many languages, and the world of the empty streets and empty homes where people who should have been working on their own blogs, or surfing the web, or sitting at a desk at work, or stretching after a return to running, are not.

In my professional world, we concentrate on the enduring memories, the enduring patterns, but we look too infrequently at the things that mark us that are transitory, traumatic. We look all too infrequently at how we carry images of environments used as weapons to traumatize.

Today I am realizing that many of us are subsumed in Boston’s tragedy, our tragedy, the tragedy of wars both official and unofficial, the wars waged by government or a tyrant’s declaration, and those waged by personal rage.

I wonder who you are. And I wonder where you are as you are reading these words—on an urban street in Delhi where the sound of traffic drowns the sound of the computer fans? Having a beer at Teresa Scara in Targu Mures, Romania? At the fish market in Hoi An, Vietnam?

I google the maps of these places that seem so distant and different—Qatar and Uruguay, Zimbabwe and Moldova and the Isle of Man—and I wonder what shaped you and what we must seem like to you. I wonder whether you came here by chance or because someone referred you. I wonder what you are having for breakfast or lunch as you read these words, and what the sounds are from the next room or across the street. I wonder what it is that you understand of the place that has shaped us, and how it seems precious or idyllic or naïve. 

And I wonder how you are making sense of the Boston bombings…if they even are part of your consciousness.

Many years ago, I decided that it would be valuable to create a dictionary of the words that relate to place, a dictionary that took simple words like “home” and “community” and translated them into other languages; a dictionary that would explain the nuances in those words in more complex ways than merely a word substitution. My Korean students told me that there was no word for “home” in their language that didn’t imply family; my Israeli student told me that the word for home was one that implied physical structure. So as I sit here writing (once again about home and community) I wonder what it is that you are imagining, seeing, smelling, and what it is that makes this a different kind of community.

I have been told that most of those who read us are “bots” just surfing through for something that can translate into spam, but I want to believe that those who have come here are also part of a community that mourns those who are gone in Boston and elsewhere, a community that will gather to help those who are maimed to move on.

I am not so naïve that I think that this tragedy is your tragedy…there are too many to go around. But we must act where we can, to nurture and to heal what we share—the sadness as well as the laughter.

I hope that you will consider using the comment field here, to weigh in on your thoughts. I hope that you will find a way to help someone else temper the rage. Martin Richard, an 8 year old boy died on April 15. He is shown on the media holding a sign that reads: “No more hurting people.  Peace.”

Maybe we begin there. What are your words for peace?


Friday, April 12, 2013

Pages of wood and sheets of snow


It is sleeting outside and the winds are fierce. There is white on the ground though I hesitate to call it snow. I am sure the daffodils that were considering budding out have now turned to an icy mush. It is profoundly cold in the house though the thermostat is, as always, at 50-ish. I have been sitting beside the wood stove which is the only way to stay warm. There is an odd clock-like ticking sound and the occasional pounding that sounds like someone in work boots coming to the porch door. It is the snow and ice sheeting off the roof.

Spring.

H is on his way. It is more than a little nuts since he will have to leave late tomorrow or very early Sunday to make a noon plane, but he is determined to spend the next 24 hours here. And I am frankly grateful. There are days when we can get by well enough living separately, and given all the years I was a "single",  I actually relish my solitude, but there are some times that are harder than others, and I miss having him nearby, working at the dining room table while I work in the writing nook or outside. It has been a very social week, and I frankly should be fine with a weekend left to my own devices, but I am glad he is coming.

There is a black cherry log in the wood stove, and I am noticing for the first time, that it burns in rectangular flakes, like a string of Tibetan prayer flags, or tiny pages from a handmade book. The pages are ember orange and the edges are shroud grey. I am wondering whether other wood burns differently than cherry which has a curled page-like bark. I am wondering whether there is a link between the way the pages of wood drop from their book onto the floor of the stove, and the way the fire generates warmth. 

I can hear the fire house whistle and it isn’t noon, That means somebody needs help. Odd what you know in a small town. It was only one blast, so it isn't a house fire. Somebody is probably off the road or has a chimney fire. Today would be a tough day to be helpful. The wives of the firefighters will be preparing food for afterward, while the men and one woman who make up our volunteer squad try to stay vertical. The woman fire fighter is a new addition, having arrived from Arizona last November. She built a tiny house on 56 acres and plans to grow blueberries, buckwheat, mushrooms and baby ginger. I told her about the dangers of a roadside weed known as poison parsnip and our friend Derrick says he hopes she knows that some varieties of baby ginger are illegal here.

She knows something about technology from her previous life in San Francisco and will be teaching a class in blogging and web site development in a few weeks. Nice that she is already volunteering for both the fire company and the library and she hasn't even been here a year.

She sent me an email this morning saying that two people had come by to see her and she suspected that I had sent them. She thanked me for weaving her into the community. I suspect that they were responding to my comment about her history as a rock climber. One probably invited her to do some recreational climbing and the other to use her skills to prune trees. A hard worker is always welcome. They will teach her what they know about farming and about the trails up the hills around here and she will teach them what she knows about using fermentation to make food. Someone has already plowed her driveway without asking for payment or identifying himself (or herself). 

So she's teaching technology, and someone else is teaching landscape lessons. And someone else is teaching neighborliness. 

I am struck (again) by something I always knew. Communities have a kind of collective brain, a common knowledge that is shared by their members. And each community has different knoweldge than its neighbors because it has different residents with different skills. And each time someone moves in, the community gets smarter. And each time someone leaves or dies, we become duller; there is a real loss to the collective.  

It isn't so obvious in bigger places, but here we know that Scooter can fix any engine ever made, and Lois and Winsome and Kathy and Aleda can identify and nurture any plant in any garden. And if someone needs a well drilled, the Parkers who live down the street, have drilled so many wells around here that they know what's underground even without looking at your land. And Joey who taps our trees is second or third-generation-smart about how to put in the taps under a branch and how to put wood blocks on the trunks where the winch would sit, to keep from girdling the trees and killing them prematurely. Ed has taught me about predicting weather from the direction of the wind and the underside of the leaves, and about making honey,  and about the relationship between water temperature and the taste of fish in the stream. And I know where the wild ramps are, and the fiddleheads, and now I know where the deer and the ticks are likely to be densest on our land.

I have often thought that what mattered to me was "community" in some abstract way, when I think that what I really wanted was to know what my neighbors had to teach. A good community is one that makes everyone smarter; a struggling community privatizes wisdom, charges for its sharing, divides those who know from those who don't. A good community is one that takes the time to teach; a challenged community is one that doesn't have "enough" time. 

I live in a very wise place where people have "enough" time to teach. 

The wind has died down at last. The plastic Adirondack chairs beside the firepit in the back yard have blown over.  There is a smooth barked log in the front of the fire that is starting to have rectangular embered sections but the pages from this "book" are larger and less distinct. It is burning in a more cohesive way. I'll have to find a log like this in the wood shed, to show to one of our friends, so that I can ask what kind of wood it is. But for now, as I sit here by myself waiting for H to get home, I am beginning to learn how it warms.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Walking


One of the things I have noted in writing this blog, is that it becomes stale quickly. I started writing this post a week or so ago and back-burnered several others, and now none of them seem particularly compelling. I suppose that is a function of the blog-o-sphere; though some things rise like cream to the top, very little of what is written in this format seems worthy of keeping for long. What is also true however, is that as I noted in my last post, my head continues to buzz with writing ideas. Which thoughts will eventually get posted is unclear, but it seems that if I get them “on-paper” here, one will rise to the top of the heap. I always find that the writing goes in a different direction when I sit at the desk and do it rather than thinking about it.

I should let H describe the process of getting the cloth fitted to the table at long last. I should give him the opportunity to crow about those first shots.  What I know though is that the long-awaited pool room is a special space, one in which we will both be spending time, though for now, I am happy to leave it to him as his own sanctuary. To a person, everyone who has seen it has said something about "man-cave"--a function I suppose of the dominance of the table and some media driven assumptions about what kind of people pool draws, but the light is lovely through the glass doors, not cave-like at all, and it is a surprisingly engaging view to the south. The windows/doors open fully, and there is a sense of sitting high in a tree looking out at what passes (which around here isn’t much), and hearing, really hearing, the wind and bird calls. It is an unexpected benefit of a space that was designed for something so different. So far, there are only camp chairs and a folding table, but I expect that to change shortly, and I expect that we will both be sitting there with a pile of books and our notebooks and a pen in hand.

Meanwhile, I am having homeowner-itus. We have had a few warmish days; 50 degrees seems vaguely tropical compared to the rest of this winter and the last few nights in the teens.  I got so excited at the prospect of Spring that I let the wood boxes empty and now I have substantial work to get back up to speed on kindling and log supplies in the house and the garage. I raked several piles of daffodils clear of leaves only to find substantial clumps in a dozen other places. The lemon thyme that has overtaken the center of the raised beds has greened up, and there are chives emerging from the pale grey shroud of last year's abundant crop. The strawberries are starting to leaf out and the rhubarb has emerged as a little knot of fuchsia at the soil line. The crop of wind-fall sticks would be bliss for a retriever....More on that some time not too far off.

I find myself feeling differently about all the tasks that were part of my life for the past 13 years of living in a rural place. Certainly the changing out of the snow tires was familiar, but it felt different yesterday, and on the way back from town I noticed again that something needs to be done to fix the culvert along the road. We have given a trial run to a "powerbroom" that can be rented from the local hardware store, to put the gravel back where it belongs on the driveway rather than on the lawn (snowplowing's collateral damage), and of course, it is only after H sweated and did real grunt work, that I learned that there is a trick to using one…it will be good to know next year.

The man who taps our maple trees with his father, came by with our “payment”—two and a half  GALLONS of syrup and a small jar of maple cream. At 40 gallons of sap to a gallon of syrup, this represents a substantial commitment, and I will never take the taste of good syrup for granted again. We have chosen the “B” grade which seems sweeter, rather than tourist “fancy”, and I am happy to have this real gift from our land, and from the real hard work of our friends.

I have renewed my call to the person who does the outside jobs that require more logistical skill and brawn than we can manage--the roof raking, the toting of 3 tons of pellets from driveway to basement in 40 pound sacs up and down the stairs. He will be trying to scare up some hemlock boards from a local mill, to rebuild the raised garden beds, after we failed to find anything but cherry, ash, maple and pine on the acres behind the house. And he will find some humane means to relocate the resident groundhog that seems to occupy the "basement" of our garden shed.

I got a call a week or so ago from the woman who has been the heart and soul of this community for some three decades. She was one of the first to welcome me with a bottle of her own corn relish, and back then, she invited me to her house for one of the ritual Sunday potlucks that saw a familiar cast of characters--people I would get to know and many of whom are still close friends. Anyway, she called to ask if I would be willing to run for the Chair of the local Democratic Caucus. She is stepping down, from this and from the other offices she has held—another person coping with the ravages of cancer. I was happy to say yes, both because I am happy to do what I can to help her, and because I was inspired by the process of helping with this year’s town election, by checking off voters as they arrived to take their paper ballots to the voting booth, and by spending the wee hours counting the votes for the 30 articles by which local non-profit groups request town funding for their activities. There were, of course, a number of people running for office though only one was a contested race. The election count is a ritual that occurs every first Tuesday in March in Vermont, following a town meeting in which residents gather to debate the budgets for the town and the school, argue over costs of foreign language instruction or highway paving costs, or the proposed shelter for the “free” ladder truck. Sometimes there are national issues on which voters get to be heard though most of these are “advisory” votes and count only as a symbol of the people’s will– the troops in Afghanistan, the Defense of Marriage Act are recent examples. In any case, there was something powerful for me, in sitting behind a metal table on a metal folding chair, asking people to state their names, twice, checking them off on the official list and ensuring that they got the right ballot pages so that they could cast their votes. There were 301 people who voted this year, and almost all the articles were approved. The firehouse did not get approval for the shelter for the ladder truck though their budget was increased, and the school budget went down to defeat by 4 votes.

There was talk about introducing voting machines, instead of paper ballots, to save us the wee-hour counts and checks and rechecks that ensure a consistent and reliable result, but it would be an enormous loss I think. The people get to gather and think carefully about what they want. There are marks and erasures and marks again to demonstrate that they are actively deciding what they want, and there are few people who merely check off all the “no’s” or all the “yes” boxes. It is possible to see the community demographics at work with more consistent support for the Visiting Nurse Service and less support for Little League. But the seriousness of the process is what struck me strongly. There was no gossip, no joking, no approximations as we counted and recounted our chicken scratch calculations to ensure accuracy. There were some bleary eyes by the end of the evening, but when a close vote necessitated a recount, the counters returned to their tables and began again without hesitation. In the end, I got to see the best of a democracy at work, and was glad to have been asked. I will Chair the Democratic Caucus with pleasure – another opportunity to talk about the issues that matter and to do the work at hand.

As of today, the snow is gone except in the lee of the wood shed roof. We will need to do an inspection of the roof slates to see whether any are missing after the snow, and we will soon be having someone examine the pipes that once fed the house with spring water before our current well was drilled by the prior owners. (The well water tested free of coliform this past week, if you are interested). We acquired a three bowl porcelain sink that will be set up outside so that the garden pots can be washed in the spring water and it will have a hose hookup so that we can water the garden.

I have a minor case of OCD about keeping the kitchen and dining area clean as we frequently have people stopping in, and when I dropped a half quart of tomato soup all over the kitchen yesterday, I found myself washing and rewashing the range and the iron burners, washing and spray-cleaning the oven door and the vents beneath it, washing the cabinets, cleaning and mopping the floor and running the sink mats through the dishwasher. One remains a lovely shade of pink.  Of course that led to mopping the dining room floor and the sitting area by the woodstove, and the living room floor, which was a good thing in the end, because we held the building committee meeting here, and seven people sat at the table relishing the wood stove heat.

I have yet to sleep in all the beds in the house; we bought a new one when we moved so that our friends could stay here in that first week of chaos. I have never taken a bath in the upstairs bathroom. I continue to look for a replacement for the fixture in the small bathroom upstairs which I just found out also has a fan, presumably for the potential of converting it into a shower room if needed, so the discoveries continue. I keep moving things into new places -- the wood bowls need a better "home", but I have housed the cookie sheets beside the stove where they seem more logical.

In short, it is, as always, one story that comes to the fore -- about home and the many manifestations of belonging to a place. Often, I think that I have forgotten how to write about “home” which has been so much a part of my personal and professional life. Often, I think that I have forgotten entirely how to write. But given a chance, the work comes back to overwhelm the conscious mind which is filled with roof slates and chicken scratchings, and the patterns are all woven together into a fabric of identity. Ironically, I got a call a bit ago, from someone I haven’t seen in more than 15 years. He was part of a writing group I once worked with, and our teacher has just passed away. I wonder about these synchronicities that make no rational sense. Why would Carol and Jerry have come back into my life at this moment when I am confronting the challenges of writing, and confronting the “who-am-I’s”?

Last week Herb read me a post by the great writer William Rivers Pitt who is awaiting the birth of his baby. He and his wife are walking to try to accelerate the birth. He wrote, as many have done before him, of the lessons he wants to teach his daughter. He quotes from Daniel Berrigan on the lessons he will have to teach his daughter about the world she enters:

"And when she comes to wonder what can be done, I will tell her of Daniel Berrigan, and read to her some lines he wrote long ago:
Some stood up once, and sat down
Some walked a mile, and walked away
Some stood up twice, then sat down
'I've had it' they said.
Some walked two miles
then walked away
'It's too much,' they cried.
Some stood and stood and stood.
They were taken for fools
They were taken for being taken in
Some walked and walked and walked
They walked the earth
They walked the waters
They walked the air
'Why do you stand,' they were asked
'and why do you walk?'
]Because of the children,' they said
'And because of the heart'
'And because of the bread,'
'Because the cause is the heart's beat
And the children born
And the risen bread.'
I will tell her: within reach of your arm, do what you can.
In the meantime, we walk."
I suppose that is what I am finding; that within the reach of my arm, I do what I can. And in the meantime I walk. And I walk. And I rake. And I write.