Sustainability

I am sitting at my desk in my tiny house in my tiny town in my tiny state. This is a state of 621,760 and one well-founded estimate says that in 2009 there were 300,000 wage earners paying taxes in this state. [CORRECTION!!! My friend Bill says: "310,000 income tax filers of whom 160,000 must pay something. The rest are income-sensitized out of any income tax liability."]

That is, all the schools and all the roads are paid for by 160,000 people.

In normal times, these two issues are hugely contentious at town meetings which determine the expenditures by local government. This town of 800 or so people has a $2 million school budget for 57 elementary school kids and 22 children who are bused to area middle and high schools.  We are lucky that the town came out relatively unscathed though Rodney and Alida lost their sweet corn and there are sections of road out on North St. and West St.

My friend Emmett came by this morning with 5 lovely garden tomatoes. I gave him a yellow squash and some patty pan squash and some sun gold tomatoes. Our friends Linda and Ursula are drowning in a half bushel of tomatoes for sauce, from another neighbor's garden.  If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that I describe gardeners as a generous breed. Sometimes we are too generous.

But I am struck by this generosity at a time when there are people who can't get out of their homes because of the road closures and bridges that have washed out.There is an estimate of 250 road closures state-wide due to Hurricane Irene.One friend can't get to her job in a town a half hour from here, across the washed out east-west Rt. 4. Her father leaves his truck at the paved road and gets on the 4 wheeler at the top of a logging road to get home--before dark. The small bridge to his trailer was washed out.  Multiply that by tens of  thousands.

I am actually longing for some protein and since I don't eat meat and eat fairly little poultry, that means fish. And there isn't any in the freezer.I can drive to the town with the supermarkets - that section of road is open. Not everyone can. Multiply that by some thousands.

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I am teaching a class in NYC in a newly minted program in Sustainable Interior Environments, and the first class was drowned out by Hurricane Irene. I am teaching students I have never met, by email and the internet. Certainly driving to NYC is not a sustainable solution but the train system is a disaster, and it won't be easy to get to Boston to take the bus to NYC which had been my plan. So I could see my huh-huh-husband from time to time.

And that's not much more sustainable than driving to NYC in the first place.

I suppose I am hyper-aware of what sustainability means when the road system has failed. Vermont has few roads to begin with - two major north south roads and a handful of major east west roads, and three southern/central  ones had been severed as of last night. (One seems to have been fixed as of now, so I may actually have a way to see my huh-huh-husband on the weekend.)

So I have asked my students to define sustainability. And they will no doubt talk about "green materials" and low energy use.

And I am thinking that sustainability has something to do with living in communities that don't require a trip to the supermarket for protein (which if I ate meat I could do here). Which reminds me that two of our friends have start-up farms and one raises chickens. I wonder how they are faring.

And living in a place where if I have squash and you have tomatoes, we both eat decent food. A NYC friend took an apple from my tree that I had transported from VT and ate it without washing it. "No sprays," she said.

I understand that two warring parties in town came together to get North Street paved (though there may be some remuneration involved).
 
Now if only .... Herb sometimes says that my posts aren't finished. I think he's right again.

Just in case you want to come to see the leaves changing in the Fall in Vermont...

Here's what we are coping with post Irene.

Hurricane Surfing

So here's the update... I have been fielding calls from friends worried about mom and about the post-hurricane effects on her and on Vermont. I feel like the field reporter at the beach with a microphone so that people can hear the wind.  This is what it sounds like...

We weathered the storm itself in NYC pretty easily. I expected deluges and wind that would blow the window panes out of the old frames... and air conditioners dropping onto the terraces below or the courtyard between the two sides of the building. I expected airborne patio tables and terra cotta pots smashing through the windows, and I thought longingly of the value of plywood sheets in times like these. I expected power outages and had dug up a crank operated radio from layers of life like an archaeological dig. Well, ok, that's an exaggeration. It was in my car because it also has a crank flashlight, a crank emergency siren, and a crank cell phone charger (not that the cell phone charger would fit into the orifice of the radio). 

And nothing. We had some rain. My friends said there were 6+ inches, but it didn't sound like much on the housing of the air conditioner which is still in the window as of today. And there were some windy hours on Sunday afternoon, especially when I walked to the Hudson River with my friends. It was an amazing stroll with the wind stopping me in my tracks, and pulling the glasses off my face. There were pelting rain drops and trees that looked like they were about to be airborne. I was struck by the number of businesses that were closed, with employees who couldn't get to work as public transit had been shut down.  The restaurants that delivered pizza in the winter snow storm at Christmas, weren't delivering pizza on Sunday. There were several below street grade residences that had piles of sandbags beside their windows. 

Anyway, it passed and we were / are ok.

I put some of the books back on their window sills and left the rest for mom's assistant, Cherry to take care of. 

Braving cautions to stay another day, I decided to return to VT on Monday. Yes, it is my "happy place" as H describes it, but more, I wanted to see what damage had been done. I fully expected to be finding mice on little rafts in the basement, with parasols and blue martinis by their sides. 

I left my fate in the hands of the GPS though I over-rode its efforts to send me to the Holland Tunnel. My chosen route is through the Lincoln Tunnel onto the Turnpike north and then Rte 80 to New Jersey's outlet corridor in Paramus on Rte 17 where gas is relatively cheap compared to Vermont and the New York  area, and they will actually pump it for you, and clean your windshield. (Remember free drinking glasses with a fill-up?) . 

That was pretty easy, but I knew parts of the Northway at Exits 15 to 17 and exits 27 to 28 were closed--or at least they had been til 11:42 a.m.  according to Google's traffic maps.  The GPS routed me onto the Garden State Parkway and from there to the Palisades which I haven't been on since I was a teenager. It is a truly beautiful road, and it was moving fairly well despite a fair amount of traffic. I decided to take a bathroom break at the "Rest stop and Bookstore" (!!) but the power was out and the bathrooms were disabled -  a disappointment to the hordes of Hasidic families that were making a stop on their way to and from the Catskills. 

The GPS routed me onto Rt. 6 West and then Rt. 17 which happened to run alongside the Eileen Fisher outlet and the edge of the enormous Woodbury Commons outlet development. I stopped to use the bathroom at Staples, bought a new jacket at Eileen Fisher and turned onto the Northway, where there was a car about a quarter mile ahead, and one about a half mile behind, and NO OTHER cars. The south-bound lanes were empty until I suddenly saw the beginning of what turned out to be a roughly 20 mile parking lot of cars heading south on the Northway (or more accurately pointed south. They weren't heading anywhere).

At Poughkeepsie, traffic began to pick up heading north and eventually the traffic in the southbound lanes also opened up, and I drove to Troy where I left the road, knowing that the highway would again be closed en route to Glens Falls. From there I took Rte 40 through eastern New York state and then began the challenge of zigzagging on roads across the rivers that had flooded the little towns throughout this section of what I suspect was Washington County. A corn field was SUBMERGED between the road and the Battenkill River. A tractor-trailer that had started down a country road that had been marked "Closed," decided to turn around in a country lane with the only option being to back his rig up a hill in a farm field and inch his cab back into a U turn.  There were lovely ponds and lakes along both sides of the roads, that had been farm fields two days before. There were herds of cows grazing on hillsides above muddy  rivers that used to be streams. I found myself alternately imagining sleeping the night in the car, and celebrating when I came out on a familiar stretch of road, only to have hopes dashed as I encountered yet another "ROAD CLOSED" sign. As I got closer to home, I made decisions based on topography - where would the road climb, and where would it run along the river or the lake? Where would the ground be least likely to have run-off from a low-lying meadow?

I got home about 7 1/2 hours after I started, and was stunned to see dahlias on the dahlias, tomatoes on the tomatoes, rudbeckia and sunflower blossoms, though two of the sunflower stalks were down on the ground. The hanging plants had been tenderly placed on the ground by friends, and the roof was still on the house. There were no mouse rafts in the basement. 

This morning, I picked yellow and patty pan squash, tomatoes, flowers and an enormous soccer ball sized puff ball - dense with a kind of mealy flesh. I checked the corn but will wait til tonight to pick one and see if it is ripe. The houseplants which were in the garage (thanks Emmett and Kerstin!) are back under the maple and where there are a few small twigs on the ground, the laundry is hanging, drying on the line.  The Francois had a leak in their roof that dripped into the kitchen and two "geriatric" maples are damaged at David and MaryLou's. The ground is pretty spongy everywhere and the rock on which the bridge rested, accessing our little park, is gone.  Alida and Rodney's sweet corn is gone, but it won't make a major dent in the dairy operation. We escaped pretty unscathed. Still, I am going to go over to the place where I pick wild ramps (onions) later today, to see whether the river flooded them out. 

The Simon Pearce restaurant and shop in Quechee has lost its covered bridge, glassblowing operation and the hydro generator that ran it, but the restaurant and retail store are ok. Covered bridges are down all over the state and some towns are cut off. Rt. 7 is a major north-south road. Rt. 4 and Rt. 103 are major east west roads. All have been breached and are now impassable. (See below) It isn't at all clear how H will get here from Boston on Friday.  

The CEO and President of the Vermont-based phone and internet company "V-Tel" which provides my service, have sent two emails. They expect to have service restored by tonight to 100% of their customers despite major damage: 

"Sunday was the worst flooding any of our employees recall every seeing – and some have been with us 40 years. Governor Shumlin said in a New York Times story today 'We prepared for the worst, and hoped for the best, and unfortunately got delivered the worst.'  VTel emergency crews, in some cases last night, were isolated by flooding, unable to access broken fiber under flooded roads, but also prevented by police and fire emergency personnel from fording streams to reach other areas. Our redundant fiber rings were cut on both the western and eastern sides of Vermont, and also en route to Boston, and also west-to-east connecting Springfield to Wallingford, and also north-to-south connecting Springfield to Hartland, Chester to Grafton, and Wallingford to Killington. In cases where our fiber is (or was) on bridges that washed away, or under roads that eroded, the repairs require coordination.   By far the most-isolated of our service area is Killington, where our fiber ring follows Route 4 and Route 100, and both roads washed out. "

Then he included the home and cell phone numbers for the President and himself, along with their office numbers. And he said: "Thanks to all who took time to call. Almost everyone was very tolerant and gracious, and I wish we had better repair news. One caller even took time to explain to my wife how to fix our water well.

When was the last time you had that kind of email from the CEO of Verizon or AT&T?  

So that's Vermont post-Irene where, as Garrison Keillor would say, "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average."

I am off to find mushrooms to make spore prints... Oh yes, and do some work....

   

Correction

Back on August 10th, I posted an entry having to do with my 53rd birthday, and how 53 is a socially prime number, having neither mathematical divisors nor cultural meaning.  But last week, my error was pointed out to me by my friend Lee Peters, popular culture maven extraordinaire... and as you can see, it was a particularly egregious error.

Yes, Herbie's 53 indeed!

Hurrican't

The title of today's post is my prediction, 16 hours in advance, of the headline of either the New York Post or the Boston Herald, the two perennial contenders for the title of America's Worst Newspaper.

We hunkered down in our respective cities.  Nora and Mom took all of the books off the window shelves in New York, and I took the window air conditioner out and parked the car away from trees here in Medford.  And it turns out to have been no big deal for either of us.  The Weather Channel is desperately looking for footage of weather-related problems in the Northeast, but mainly they have their poor field reporters standing around looking miserable in the driving rain.

Hope for the best, and prepare for the worst.

Predictions are always fraught.  Every time I listen to Marketplace on NPR, I hear some variant of the phrase "exceeded analysts' expectations" or "surprisingly low numbers."  If we've got a team of people making six figures who only have to predict the performance of a few companies over the course of 30 days, and THEY can't get it right, then the whole project of prognostication is sort of a fool's errand.

But every action we take is, to some extent, a prediction of the future.  I'm writing this in the expectation that it will be read, but of course I don't know that.  I took the air conditioner out of the window because I expected that high winds would make that unstable, and it looks like our high winds will be in the 30s rather than the 70s.  We look at the past, make our best guesses, and then act as though we know.  As the philosopher Stephen Pepper once pointed out, although we may have a 60% chance of rain, we can't carry 60% of an umbrella.  We go in all or nothing.

The larger metaphors here are obvious, they write themselves.

Calm before the storm

I am usually bad at picking titles for posts; it is however one of the things that H takes pride in. This time however, there was little question what to have in the little box at the top of the page.

Story 1.
Mom and I are in NYC on the 18th floor of a highrise above a park. On the south, west, and north, there is nothing between us and the wind for miles. The only east facing window is on a small courtyard space with the other side of the building facing us. They are predicting that Hurricane Irene will hit tomorrow with unprecedented wind and rain.  Herb has suggested we leave and go to my brother's apartment where at least the building is a more recent rebuild and the windows are not single pane glass in 70-plus-year-old metal frames. We will spend some portion of today clearing the window sills of the books and papers and boxes and plants and the other accumulations of the years we have lived here.

There are terraces on the building with an accumulation of plants and patio tables and chairs. In the past, in storms, the water has backed up in the drains and soaked through the plaster here, flooding closets and ruining the paint.

New York Mayor Bloomberg is shutting down all public transit as of noon today. They have evacuated parts of lower Manhattan and the islands. They are predicting 100 mph winds.

Mom won't leave.

Story 2.
Mom was diagnosed with lung cancer about a month ago. She has had several procedures to remove the fluid from the cavity between the outer surface of the lung and the inner surface of the rib cage, normally 1 mm thick. They took out 2 liters when she had the recent surgery to "glue" it shut. It was keeping the lung from inflating. No surprise there. I was however surprised that what they used to close the space was talc. The irritation causes scarring and that closes up the space where the fluid would normally accumulate. No fluid?...the lung can expand. But what happens to the fluid?  Her primary care doc says it is as though you had something in your eye, and they removed the tear ducts. The eye couldn't produce tears even though the object was still there. (I like simple explanations of things.Too bad the explanation didn't come from the pulmonologist or the oncologist despite repeated attempts to ask what would happen to that fluid if the space was closed off. )

In any case, she is now back in the 18th floor apartment overlooking the park. Other than being tired, she is ok. Her breathing is better.

Story 1 (chapter 2)

The rain has just started and stopped. We closed the windows on the north side. I have a small electric fan in front of the western windows to keep the air moving.

Story 2 (chapter 2)

We are awaiting the visiting nurse who is supposed to come to check her blood pressure and may change the dressing on the incision site.

We haven't heard from the oncologist who was supposed to give her the drugs for the tumors. He was MIA all day yesterday despite repeated attempts to contact him by doctors, nursing staff, and me.

The pleurodesis which closed the cavity seems to be holding; her breathing seems to be unimpaired by any further accumulation of fluid. The metaphorical tear ducts have been removed.



 Calm before the storm.

Watching Someone Type

Not long ago, I was listening in the car to an interview with the novelist Terry Pratchett, who has been working steadily despite an increasingly disruptive Alzheimer's disease.  He's less able to concentrate than he had once been, but he also has lost some fine motor control; he's unable to type or to write long dedications at book signings.  But he's been an early adopter of technology for decades, and he now uses voice-recognition software to write orally.

I can't imagine writing that way.  My writing process is so circuitous.  A paragraph comes out, and it goes away.  Another paragraph comes out, but one of its sentences goes away.  And then three words change.  And then I move along to a new paragraph, but then re-reading I go back two paragraphs and change a misfit word.  The process of writing is not at all linear, whereas the process of oral storytelling is very linear. 

And thinking about this led me to wonder how other writers work.  A hundred years ago, when everything was manual, we at least had the benefit of working manuscripts that we could study.

A page of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America

But even there, we can only see some of the decisions.  We can't get the view of the writer's progress.  Does he barge two pages ahead like a snowplow, and then come back later to clean up with the hand shovel?  Does he fuss with each sentence as it comes, polishing each facet before moving along to another?  Does she just pour out the whole damn thing, all 300 pages of it, before putting it away for five months and then coming back to re-write?

Does she take a ten-minute break to play solitaire?  I do...

Anyway, short of becoming invisible and just standing over someone's shoulder to watch them write, I would love to have a video that was just a screen-capture of a good writer at work.  Just watching the words appear, go away, be replaced, be spelled correctly the second time.  Watching the thesaurus screen pop up, a word investigated.  Watching the distraction of looking something up on Google and following a couple of trivial side roads before getting back to the text.

Just imagine a screen capture of Joan Didion or Joe Coomer at work; what a privilege that would be to see.

I think it's a video with a very small market... but I know I'd watch it a few times.

I'm often interested in watching people at work, watching them make decisions.  What are their motives?  What are they trying to accomplish?  How much do they know ahead of time, and how much do they create on the fly?

Obsessions and Weather

I'm going down to New York to be with Nora and Estelle when she comes home tomorrow.  I wasn't sure about when I'd leave, so I looked at the weather for New York and for Boston.  All predictions were for occasionally strong thunderstorms today, in both cities, extending through late tonight.  By Friday, all should be clear and calm.  So decided to stay here today and leave early Friday morning, and I hunkered in to do some writing.

It's now quarter past eleven on Thursday night, and it's been completely clear since I read those forecasts at just before one o'clock this afternoon.  I looked out at my car parked at the curb, and saw that there were some water spots on the windshield at about 4:00 this afternoon.  I could be in New York easily.  I just hope I don't get rained on in the morning, but I'm not even going to bother with the forecasts.  It'll do whatever it's gonna do.

But as I say, I started writing at about 1:00, and just finished ten minutes ago.  It took me ten hours to write five hours of one character's life—he got up at 8 am and I just wrote him up to 12:45 in the afternoon.  He's an interesting character, but too easy so far, not complicated enough.  And he's in an interesting circumstance, but he isn't struggling enough with it yet.  The other characters are cardboard, except for two who are showing me some potential.  (I sound like I'm conducting tryouts for a baseball team.  And in a way, I am.  Some of those characters are going to get cut after spring training, and the others are going to need a lot of coaching.)

And so now I'm exhausted, so what am I doing?  Writing a blog post.  Nuts, eh?

[I hear thunder in the distance... at 11:27 pm]

Entering a New Country

Nora's in New York this morning, helping Estelle go through the next procedure in her treatment plan.  I'm not going to get into the details of it, at least partly because I don't UNDERSTAND the details of it.

Entering the world of contemporary medicine really is like visiting another country.  The habits are different—on even the simplest visit, you'll be handed off from the receptionist to a physician's assistant to the physician, in a sort of diplomatic procession from junior aide to senior staff to consul.  The language is certainly different—every trip is a vocabulary lesson, with long Latinate words like pleurodesis and whole new concepts like hazard rate (which isn't as simple as it sounds).  And the beliefs are certainly different—the idea of gluing internal body parts together sounds, on its face, as primitive as the application of leeches.  And the idea that closing off a space will prevent fluid from building up in that space certainly makes sense, but as every plumber knows, you have to shut off the supply at some point or the fluid will find another place to go.  Apparently, medicine and plumbing are NOT perfectly analogous, who knew?

When you enter the serious medical world, you find the land of specialists.  And those specialists, knowing their one body part or system far better than the other members of the team, have to negotiate an outcome which may not be optimal from their own vantage point but which serves the whole patient best.  But the specialists rarely meet now—it's all rapid exchanges of e-mails from the BlackBerry while going from one procedure to the next.  And any of you who have a smart phone know that it's not hardware that supports one being garrulous; you state your facts and move on.  So we're relying strongly on Estelle's long-time family physician to hold the center, to see her as not just pleura and effusion rates but as a whole person, and to be the ambassador between one nation and another.

We can talk about this in terms of one person with a particular illness, but really, all of us are dealing with these questions of balance between competing specialties.  I have for years focused on work to the neglect of other areas of my life.  And I never meant to do that.  But the specialties of work are more immediately demanding than the rest, at least in part because the goals are more overt and more short-term.  I knew what that accreditation report required, and I knew when it was due, and I knew that being late was not acceptable.  Neglecting your own health, or your family, or your emotional life, doesn't have the same kind of clarity of outcomes until much later.

This year has largely been about rebalancing, about defining the relative importance of the multiple aspects of our lives.  We are entering a new country.

A Different Garden

Nora rhapsodises about gardening.  She can spend endless hours attending to the state of plants, the growth over two days, the size of the squash.  And the garden isn't fussy, by any means.  I don't intend to indicate a sort of fastidiousness or victory over nature.  Quite the contrary, the garden is understandable only at two scales, the broad swath (that tall stuff over there is corn, and I can see that a corner of the garden has purple flowers now) and the microscopic detail (two bugs on the brussels sprouts; the way a cauliflower head does or does not bunch).

I, on the other hand, have no emotional socket for the gardening hobby to plug into.  It does nothing for me.  I can admire a beautiful garden, and I can admire a working farm, and I can admire the agreeable miscellany that Nora produces so well (and can also enjoy its bounty of tomatoes and basil).  But I have no interest in producing it.  For me, it's only a chore.  I actually take more pleasure in shoveling snow and stacking wood.

However, I have been hard at work lately on my own writing, for the first time in ages.  I've had a good month pushing forward with a story idea, Nora and I played all weekend with a thought for a children's book, and then there's this blog.  It's kind of my own gardening, and equally a kind of agreeable miscellany.  I can understand it at the largest scale: there are three projects, a novel, the children's book, and the blog-nonfiction-thing-a-jig.  And I can understand it at the microscopic detail: the way that the novel's character Joel speaks is very different than the way that Melissa speaks, because they're different ages, grew up in different families and areas, work in different businesses.  The way that I write a character for an eight-year-old reader is very different than a character for a five-year-old reader, or fifteen.

I can't tell you yet what any of the three are about.  Stories are only about something when the reader reads them.  My job is merely to make things that are fit for reading, to tend to their growth and their shape.  That's been my own summer garden.

Morning in Vermont

It is a quiet morning here in Vermont. H and I walked the cats in the yard. There was something that got their attention. It had walked along the garage and through the corn which is now about 7 feet high-- as Mom reminded me: "as high as an elephant's eye."  They tracked it happily, looked longingly at the pear tree as a place to climb, and fantasized about a trip through the cemetery to visit friends.

The sun gold tomatoes are doing well but the Romas are sluggish - probably because they are trapped between the 6 foot vines of the sun golds and the patty pan squash and a hedge of dahlias that is just starting to flower purple. The winter squash that was struggling with beetles for the first 6 weeks of its life has now gone wild and is sending runners into the corn and the rhubarb, and down the hill toward the brussel sprouts. I hope the eating is worth it. There is a lesson I have to relearn every year--no matter how much room I give the plants at the beginning, they will be crowded by midsummer and jungled by the time of harvest.  Weeding is now nearly impossible without a machete and truth be told, I haven't the time to do what is needed.

A garden is a series of life lessons and providing adequate room for the plants is only one. As I am about to embark on another trip to spend some time with Mom and teach the first class, I am struck by the balance of time allotted to planting vs. harvesting in my life. I have so far avoided the obsession with seed catalogs in the Spring, but the desire to plant is visceral. I can spend entire days lost in preparing the dirt and digging and weeding with bare hands. My back is usually pretty sore, but I am far more flexible as summer comes and I have been more mobile than is my winter pattern. As with most other gardeners, my ambition often exceeds my ability to maintain what I have planted, and by now the hanging plants we bought to prettify the place for the wedding, are pretty peaked. The stone circle on which I lavished early attention hasn't had a single weed pulled and there is still a plant that never got planted, in its pot buried in the shade where it seems to be hanging on to life. The house plants are surviving outside in the shade on neglect and the occasional spray of water; in fact, they are thriving.

But with harvest beginning, I am finding little time to prepare for canning and preserving and freezing what I have worked so hard on. I put up 18 cups of basil into 10 snack bags of pesto earlier this week, and 10 cups of rhubarb are in the freezer. I have an enormous bowl of early apples and have yet to start thinking about preparing them for sauce or pies. I have been keeping up with the relatively limited production of patty pan squash by giving most of it away. The tomatoes sit in two containers - one whole and one of splits that are overripe but will make a good cooked meal.  I will take much of it down to New York, and friends will enjoy what I can't prepare for winter. I am relieved that the potatoes, winter squash, brussel sprouts and second crop of apples have yet to be ready for harvest. Perhaps there will be more time in September to do what is needed.

So why do I do all the work of preparing the soil when there is never enough time for adequate harvesting? There is of course, pleasure in the pure work of preparation. It is never so clear in the rest of my life, that the work I put in "bears fruit". There is a direct connection between effort expended and the results on the table. And there is that reminder again, every time I take out a freezer pack of corn or rhubarb and use it for a winter meal. But there is another secret pleasure in this. I spent much of my young adulthood convinced that I had a brown thumb, that I couldn't keep a plant alive. Now it is clear, between the garden and the orchids that keep re-blooming, that something is different. Part of that is a reminder about how important the things we take for granted are for our survival...good soil and light even support plants that are neglected. But part of that is also a reminder that I have changed. Living here has made a difference in me.  It has allowed me to pay closer attention to the shape of the weather and where the water will gather or drain. It has made watching for the weather of real importance --not just a casual exercise in what shoes to wear to work. But when people say that we don't change as we get older, that we just become more of what we were, this is a marker that the things we love and turn our attention to, can allow us to reinvent ourselves, and heal the scars we have carried forth.  That's a big conclusion for a little thing like pulling weeds.

The Blush is Off the Rose

Last night, Nora was reading some online parts of a kids book about math and numbers (rationale to follow).  In his dedication, the author wrote, "If the sum of my nieces and nephews is 15, and the product of my nieces and nephews is 54, and I have more nephews than nieces, how many..."

And I didn't even let her finish.  I said "Nine nephews and six nieces."

She didn't bat an eye, and kept on reading.

I said, "Hey, you're supposed to be impressed by that!  It's no good having super-powers if they don't scare people!"

Nora replied, "I'm used to it by now."

And so it goes... the heroic savant husband now taken for granted...

The reasoning behind investigating kids books about numbers is that Nora had a completely brilliant idea over dinner, and she was investigating what the competition looked like.  The curse of the writer is that you have far more ideas than you have time to complete, so you need to pursue the ones that you care about and that feel substantial enough to bear the burden of the time you invest.  The joy of the writer is that you have far more ideas than you have time to complete, and you have that little moment of pure pleasure imagining what that project might look like.  This one's still in that middle ground, where the structural certainty has yet to be tested.

A Brainstorming Weekend

Nora and I have a small business.  Nora actually launched it about a decade ago, and then I came on as a partner long after.  We've been inactive for a while, given how busy we've been in other parts of our lives, but now it's time to revive and re-launch.  We talked with a good friend yesterday about web design options, so this weekend, we'll be doing a lot of the web content.

How best to represent ourselves?  Not merely in what we say, but in how we say it?  Those of you who've been reading the blog for a while can recognize almost immediately whether a new post was written by Nora or by me.  We use language differently.  We organize ideas differently.  We choose different graphics to represent ourselves.  We'll have to work hard to come to a single message.

We also have to launch the legal structures of this business—the charter, the accounting... the name.  (It has a name, but we may change that up as well.)

There'll be a new random list, as ideas emerge out of sequence.  We'll feel overwhelmed, we'll feel enthused, we'll be wary, we'll be open.  This is going to be a lot of fun, if we can let it.

On another front, you may remember my discovery a couple of weeks back of Swedish Fish ("New Food!," July 27).  I have since discovered a commercial for Swedish Fish, which makes as little sense as the product itself. 

Focusing the Mind

When difficult times arise, I'm often surprised at how much patience I have for going through what needs to be done... and how little patience I have for things that are done in bad faith, done for ulterior motives.  I've had a full day of both.

There’s a telling scene in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfires of the Vanities, in which the 9-year-old daughter of “master of the universe” broker Sherman McCoy asks him what he makes.  He attempts, through the space of three or four increasingly desperate pages, to explain how constructing and brokering arbitrage deals is a productive and important way of making a living.  It’s a crucial scene — McCoy’s life is coming apart on several counts, all of which he can attempt to blame on others instead of his own hubris and carelessness, but here on the beach, faced with an child’s innocent question, he is unavoidably confronted with the meaningless of his work.

I saw something the other day that included a link to Bard College.  I went to their home page, since I didn't really know much about Bard except its excellent reputation.  But I stopped dead at their marketing tag line.

Bard.  A Place to Think.

I read that and I thought that's EXACTLY what I had in mind 20 years ago this month when I set off to graduate school to start my Ph.D.  I didn't want to be a tenured faculty member, I didn't want to be a department chair, I didn't want to be a Dean or a Provost.  I wanted a place to think, and to become a part of that place.  I wanted to read smart ideas, talk with smart people, write smart things that would be of help (or at least of comfort or inspiration) to others.

I already knew that the professions, for the most part, discourage thinking.  They encourage predictability, repetition of successes.  There's an old saying: "When you hire an architect to solve your problem, you're going to get a building."  It's true of almost every profession, though—by the time you get hired, the problem is about 98% defined, and you get to fill in the edges. 

What I didn't expect was the degree to which the business of higher education swallows you up, kidnaps you from the land of thinking to the land of professionalism.  You set out to advocate for young people, and you end up writing ad copy.  You set out to have a research life, and you end up deciding how to assemble a PDF for the accreditors.  The important is shut out by the urgent.

I hadn't realized until writing this post that it was exactly 20 years ago—fall semester 1991—that I moved from Berkeley to Milwaukee to join the doctoral program at UWM, that I found my place to think.  The people I most admired there were busy teaching and reading and writing.  That had been true at Berkeley as well.  And in both cases, I learned both through instruction and through example how to think at least a little bit myself.

It's time to do that again.  Everybody should think at least once every 20 years or so.

Speaking of thinking, I read a very fine set of thoughts last week by the graphic designer Milton Glaser, on the most important things he's learned.  And I now share them with you, if you'll click here.

"When I'm 64"

When H and I married, we were not young lovers in the first blush of infatuation. We had known each other for many years as colleagues, then as friends, and then as partners. At each phase, we learned new things about each other. That gave us a substantial base on which to build. When I got sick in North Carolina with my ruptured appendix, he was waiting as I was unloaded from the ambulance, and he sat with me through the 14 hour wait in the emergency room. He was the one to call my mother, and he was there with fuzzy leopard dice for the IV pole, and a necklace to welcome me when I was released. In between, there were scenes of varying degrees of gruesomeness. It was not a pleasant time. 

But apart from that, and a full panoply of headaches and viruses and ingrown toenails, we have been pretty healthy and pretty lucky. Our chronic medical conditions are manageable.

But our minimal encounters with the medical community are about to change. My mother has been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. I hesitate to write this on a blog where some of you who are reading this may not know about it. But we have made a commitment to chronicling the first year of marriage. And this is what the first year looks like, in part. At a time when I might otherwise be preparing for a new semester, at a time when H and I should be celebrating still, we are in separate states, geographically and emotionally.

I have spent two days with good, caring medical people, who have done "it" all right. I have been in a lead lined room in a sub-basement below New York's Park Avenue, listening through the walls, to the banging of the MRI machines, and I have laughed with "Ma" and "Sonny,” the nuclear medicine trained techs, who helped Mom through the PET/CT and CAT scans.

H has been in Boston, coping with the pending report for the accreditation agency and evaluating portfolios that will allow students to move from their first course sequence to the more advanced level.

We have been alternately saddened and hopeful by the news of the past week—can so much happen in so little time?

• “yes it is cancer, probably breast or lung, and if it is breast cancer with estrogen receptivity, it is treatable.” Who would have imagined that we would be hoping for breast cancer.

• “But it is lung cancer, stage 4, the tumor having infiltrated the pleural cavity between the outer wall of the lung and the ribs.” They aspirated 1.5 liters of fluid through a needle in her back.

• “She will need a CAT scan of the brain and a PET/CT scan of the whole body to determine whether there is spread to brain or bone or …”

•  “It has not affected any of her other organs but it is still metastatic disease.”

Then there is the reading between the lines on the promise and threat of chemo, the cost of pills, the statistics (none) on 91 year old women. We DO however know that some drug is 80% effective in women of a certain age who have never smoked and are Asian.

We take pleasure in news that is less bad than what might have been.

As a good child of the liberal left, I am susceptible to all the logical and politically correct narratives about equity and the disparities in the health care system. My mother has access to great physicians on short notice when millions of others have no access to health care, and children die every day because they have no access to medicines that could cure relatively minor diseases.

As a person with a broad social network, I am also aware of how many people are living with major medical histories: friends with cancer in various stages – active and in remission, a friend who was diagnosed as HIV positive at 29 and is now 50 something--he wasn't supposed to live this long.

And so I know at the same time that we are coping with this, that we are truly lucky. My mother is 91 and could have died years ago if she hadn't had heart surgery; or could have been crippled if she hadn’t had a dual hip replacement a decade ago.

But I am sitting now in her living room... the same spot from which I wrote my message to Herb for our wedding day. The last time I sat here, I wrote: “I am sitting on Mom’s couch in New York after a long day of errands…to find THE dress for the wedding, to get my hair cut, to find the right paper for our letters to each other. I am 8 feet from the window sill I sat on to watch people walk through the park... Probably like most girls, I spent a fair share of that time on the radiator imagining what it would be like to be married, and who I would marry. ..But whatever I imagined, and whatever I saw of the marriages of friends, our marriage will be shaped by the days and nights to come. That is what I have learned in the years we have shared.”

I am sitting now in the same spot, worrying what the next months will bring for my mother, and for those who care for her. I am sitting in the same spot, looking out at the same scene I watched decades ago, where no one knows what is happening 18 stories above, and we don’t know what is happening below. I am sitting in the same spot, tired from lack of sleep, lonely for the man I married, and wondering where we will be when we are 91—or I am. I will be there before him. I am wondering what we will know about each other then.

Triangulation

Nora's in New York.  I'm in Medford.  All of our Vermont friends are in Vermont.  The cats are in Medford.  Estelle is in New York.

The tomatoes and basil and squash and corn are in Vermont.

Nora will be teaching this fall.  Two classes in Boston, one class in New York.
I'll be teaching this fall.  Two classes in Boston.

Nora has a Japanese car manufactured in Mississippi.  It's registered in Vermont but she bought it in Massachusetts. 
I have a Japanese car manufactured in Ontario.  It's registered in Massachusetts but I bought it in Vermont.  It has a Vermont bumper sticker.

There are a couple of great pool rooms in New York within 15 minutes walk of Estelle's apartment. 
There's one pretty decent pool room in Peabody, about 45 minutes drive from my apartment in Medford.
There's one pretty decent pool room in South Burlington, about two and a quarter hours drive from our house in Vermont.

In 2009 and 2010, I missed Nora's birthday because I had to be in Boston, but we were together for my birthdays.  In 2011, we were both in Boston for Nora's birthday, but she missed mine because she had to be in New York. 

Two of our Vermont friends had to miss our wedding because they were in Boston for a parent's wake and funeral. 

No matter which two places you connect, the line you draw will take four hours.  Vermont-Boston, four hours.  Vermont-New York, four hours.  Boston-New York, four hours. 

Where the three points were joined

Engineers will tell you that triangles are stable; sociologists will argue otherwise. 

Prime Numbers

As you may know, I'm kind of a numbers freak.  An odd thing, given that I went into qualitative research for a reason.  But when presented with a number, I'll try to make some mathematical or social pattern out of it.  For instance, when I'm stuck in traffic, I'll often play a game with license plate numbers around me.  For instance, 46T W29.  T is 20 and W is 23, so that's 43, plus 10 (4+6) is 53, plus 11 (2+9) is 64.  Not divisible by 3, sorry, you lose.

Numbers have social connections.  57 is 19x3, but it's also the varieties of Heinz products.  21 is 7x3, but it's also the legal age of full adulthood, and a winning blackjack hand. 

This year, I turn 53, a number which is both mathematically and socially prime, carrying no other connections.  It doesn't divide by any other whole number, and it doesn't have an immediate social metaphor.  It's not one of those round zero numbers that marks the beginning of a decade and sets off existential crises.  It doesn't qualify me for Federal benefits or grocery store discounts or reduced-price movie tickets.  It's more than the number of states in the Union and fewer than the number of nations in the UN.  There is no famous Highway 53.

All non-prime numbers can be described as a rectangle.  For instance, if you used a dot for each number, the number 48 would be a rectangle six dots tall and eight dots wide; 124 would be 4 dots tall and 31 dots wide.  But prime numbers like 53 are lumpy; they don't fit a predictable shape.

I never thought I'd be 53.  I don't mean that in a morbid, rock-star way like I never thought I'd live this long.  I just mean that I don't have a story in my head for what it means to be 53.  Nobody says, "Well, now that you're 53, we expect that you can ____." 

It's a narrative-free number.  It can be whatever I make it.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!

Well friends, we have an occasion to celebrate. We have been married for 46 days and are still happy together. That might be enough occasion for celebration, but today is Herb's birthday...

Care to wish him a Happy Day?

I have to be in New York, so I would personally welcome your keeping him reminded of how much he is loved by all of his friends-- and now ours! So if you are someone who was with us on the 25th or is with us through the means of virtual contact, sign on and wish him the best birthday ever - from France or Czechoslovakia, or Latvia, or Singapore or Jordan or Norway or Canada or Antarctica! You can post a comment below if you have a google account ... or as "Anonymous" if you'd prefer!

And to my huh...huh...hus.. husband?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY from your wuh..wuh....wife!
.

Pain

Backaches are weird things.  The very first time I had back pain, I was 32 years old and going to school at Berkeley.  We were taking a studio course every Friday in which we were designing and building a rammed-earth structure up at the Farralones Institute with Sim van der Ryn... it was hard physical work, clearing the site and building plywood forms and running the cement mixer.  But I left every time feeling pretty good.

One Friday, a group of us were driving home together.  We'd come across the Carquinez Bridge on Interstate 80 and were traveling south through Crockett and Rodeo, next to the Chevron refinery at Richmond.  It was dusk, and I turned in the back seat to get a view of the natural gas flares... and felt like someone had stabbed me right in the center of the back.  I couldn't expand my chest to breathe; I couldn't shift forward or backward.  People talk about a breathtaking experience—that was a literal one.

That's happened to me a few times since, maybe every three years or so.  And almost always in my mid to upper back.  I once had a chiropractor looking with me at my spinal x-ray, and while the lower half of my back was textbook-perfect curvature, the upper half was rolled forward about 10 degrees from where it should have been.  Since I learned that, I've made sure to have my computer monitor elevated so that my head is up while I'm working.  But the laptop doesn't work that way...

Anyway, I came up to Vermont on Friday evening, and spent much of Saturday writing on the laptop.  At one point, I carried all the wine left over from the wedding down a set of non-code-compliant, narrow, and uneven stairs to the basement.  I got up at 4:00 to cook dinner so we could go to Lois and Paul's at 6:00.  And by the time we got there and sat at their patio table, I knew I was in trouble.  No sudden pop like sometimes happens.  Not connected to any particular twisting or lifting.  But I could NOT find a sitting position that felt right.

And this pain was down in the small of my back, in the classic "oh my aching back" location.  That's only happened once before.  It got worse as the evening went on; I was able to be my sparking conversational self, but every time I moved a little, I got a reminder that things were not right.  When we left at about 10 o'clock, the process of getting into and out of my low car was pretty darn difficult.  Lifting my right foot to get it out of the footwell and over the door threshold... ow. Or, rather, OW!

I took a Motrin and went to bed.  Sunday morning... getting out of bed was pretty remarkable.  We can all turn in bed from our back to our side without any conscious thought at all.  But on Sunday morning, I was trying to think of the sequence of muscles I would normally use to roll over, and whether there were some alternatives that use only arms and legs and no torso.  Finally I got up; putting on socks and shoes was the hardest.

So many things we do without thinking.  Reaching over at a 45 degree angle to pick up a book from the table.  Picking up a piece of dropped cauliflower from the floor.  Pulling a chair in to the table after sitting.  All of those and many more were simply not possible.

But after a day of hot pads and high doses of Motrin, I slept pretty well Sunday night.  I left for Boston a day later than I'd planned, and got out of the car and stretched out on a regular basis. I went to the office on Monday afternoon and worked second shift, and then through the day today.  Pain-free.

Would that all of the troubles of our lives responded to Motrin and hot pads...

“CONTENTS AND COUNTRY ITEMS”

So sometimes I don't know how to start a blog post or other piece of writing... and this is one of those times. There are days, many, when I feel as though I have nothing to say. And then there are the days when there is too much. And sometimes, on those days, what I say is a stand-in for what I don’t.  Or can’t.

•  I could start by setting the scenes as I usually do...As I began this, I was in the living room on a dense and humid afternoon and Herb was in the shower. We were going off to dinner at the home of friends. They live around the corner, and we were taking roasted potatoes with tofu and broccoli. It was one of Herb's recipes.  I seasoned the potatoes with ground mustard, garlic, kosher salt, lemon pepper, and dried oregano from last year's garden.

• Or I could tell the story of the baby bird that had fallen, or been pushed, from its nest in the big maple. It had pin feathers of black and brown, with some white, and sky blue cartilage under the wing. His back was bare. Perhaps it had been pecked. The inside of his mouth was a brilliant orange and it seemed impossibly bigger than his whole head. Betti and Nelson had been here and were about to pick raspberries when Nelson nearly stepped on it. He took the ladder off his red truck, a chock from his stepfather’s airplane wheels to stabilize the ladder’s foot, and he climbed up to replace it in its nest. Later, when I found two babies on the ground, the second one younger, pink and leggy, Emmett came over twice, to return first the pair, then the older one again, to the nest. He brought hay with him the second time and made an aurora to help stabilize the shallow nest.

• Or I could start by reviewing the day. I had gone for a walk at about 9 a.m. As it's Saturday, the post office closes early - at 11:30 - and Liz (who works at the post office) would be off to ride her horse and get him ready for a show the next day. It was also dump day, which is sort of a holiday in Middletown, because you are bound to see friends, and catch up on the news. I knew that if I started out my walk at 9, I could be back in time to stop to see Liz, and run an errand to the dump even though it wasn't really needed.

I decided to walk north and rounded the corner of the cemetery.  There were a few cars parked at the little restaurant run by our friend Sissy. I passed the house our friends had sold about three years ago at the husband’s insistence. He had wanted to be closer to town, and to their social events, and medical care, should the need arise. Though they had lavished care on the house and gardens, it had increasingly become a burden he said, and now, they were creating a smaller version, pushing out the boundaries of their city plot and planting tomatoes in pots on their second floor deck.

I passed Lois and Paul's verdant gardens, and the house of the woman who had helped me rescue our Simon from the streets and gardens of the town. The house across the street is rumored to have sold after several years languishing on a depressed housing market. But now, it is one of five reputed to have sold in recent weeks, after a long dry spell.  There’s a look about a house that hasn’t sold, of neglect perhaps, the berm along the edge of the road bare in spots, the realtor sign sinking, one leg deeper than the other. And there is something of an echo. 

As I approached the library, I saw a friend parking her car. She isn't someone I know well, but her husband has done some furniture restoration for me. My friend, let's call her Carol, wasn't at the wedding, but she was at the funeral we went to a week later. She was a member of the Congregational church in town, and I think she once told me it was part of why she and her husband had decided to settle here, why they had bought one of the old houses in town --a cape, set back from the road, on a lovely piece of land. I think though, they have left the congregation now, but my memory is fallible, and it’s been a long time.

Carol's father died recently, and her mother had died less than a year before. Maybe it was 6 months. Carol had cared for him here, for some time before he passed, as she would have liked to have cared for her mother, but the house here was just too far away from the house in Connecticut where she spent summers. "I could have tucked her in," she said, and I was struck by her need to nurture her mother as she had her son, and the patients whose disabilities make them dependent on her for care.

When I bumped into her at the funeral some weeks ago, it had been more than a year since I had seen her or her husband. He hasn't done any work for me lately and I haven't been walking the Buxton Loop the way I used to. And that's when I would see her. She told me that she had been occupied with caring for her father, and now that "he is with mom," she had been trying to sell the house and its contents. They will try to interest a land trust in taking on the trails her grandfather had carved into the 160 acres of woods and meadow, trails that have been overgrown in the four years since her mother got sick. Her sister wants to get rid of as much as possible, and sell the house as fast as they can, but Carol is struggling with the end of generations in the house and on the land--eight if you count her son. 

"My home is with my husband and son," she said. "It was different for my mother. The house was her home. My father never liked it there, but her mother's mother had grown up there....I have her journals and it was different then. In one of them she says, 'we were going back to B_____ today but then we realized there wasn't anything we needed to go back for, so we just decided to stay another few days.' They could do that then. They'd spend their time burning off the roadside or fixing the barn, or straightening up the house. She'd talk about the peas that were growing. And you could just tell, she was happy."

But now, the house that has been in the family for 200 years is about to be sold. An auctioneer has been taking pictures of “the contents of this old farmhouse and barns. We have not dug though all of the barns and hiding places, so I’m sure there will be more nice country items at this auction.”   “Contents and country items.”

"If you wanted to start up a dairy farm like it was in 1904 when the school here in Middletown was built, you could do that. They just put everything in the attic and the barns. There's a butter churn, and someone was a shoemaker. There's a Hoosier cabinet I'd like, but I don't have room. I told my sister to take it, but her husband wouldn’t have it in the house. Mice. She said since I wanted it, I should have it. When I put on an addition for my kitchen I'll have a place for it, but I don't have room. I took a candle out of a box that was inside a box in that cabinet and put it in a Twinkie to wish my sister a Happy Birthday and she wouldn't touch it.  It’s not just the pre-diabetes. No mouse came near that! "

So Carol has spent uncounted hours going through 200 years of her family's life, 200 years of what they did, and what they believed and what they imagined; 200 years of the daily rituals as well as the special occasions--the graduation dress, the wedding dress. She has the teaspoons that belonged to her great grandmother and her sister. "They're small. Don't take up much room." And she has a lock of her great grandmother's hair. "It could have been cut yesterday."  She has her mother's journals, and "mom wrote in the journal that they forgot to put their initials in the cement for the new cistern-- 'for the generations that follow.' Ouch" she said, her voice rising at the end, as it would if you had been struck.  She has the letters that were written when her grandmother and grandaunt were fighting over the ownership of the house. "There was a lawyer involved."

There are ceramic jugs with blue outlines of birds. One is dated 1878. Two years earlier, the telephone had been invented and a year after that, Edison would invent the electric light bulb. There is a "great wheel" spinning wheel I would be interested in, its main wheel five feet across. There's flax. There's a blanket chest and a wooden bowl and oil lamps and a painting or two.

The auctioneer has a contract that says if they have photographed it, and it's on the web site, it is going to be sold, and she realized that the quilt she made for her parents is on the bed. She isn't proud of it; it isn't her best work. But it feels odd, she says that they are going to sell it. She doesn't have a place for it here. She doesn't have a bed the right size. And someone buying it probably won't know it isn't her best work. But, she says, it still feels odd.

“I’ll call the auctioneer about the wheel,” I said, “and maybe the blanket chest. It would be good to have some of your family’s things nearby wouldn’t it?”

I walked on, and I passed the Catholic Church where another friend is getting married in October. She’ll be moving to the town where she grew up, but her mother now lives in Maine, and she will be grieving for her beloved Vermont. “But I’m tired of living apart from my best friend,” she says. She may have the same piper that out friends Josseline, Joseph and Chloe “gave” us for our wedding. 

I passed the Tarbell farm, where Rodney and Alida are building a new house up in the back pasture where they can see the sunset. The “beefers” were walking across the driveway the other day when Alida was sitting under a tree during her lunch hour, watching the men move their equipment around. They’ve lived in a 19^th century farmhouse with cats and next door to cows for the 11 years I’ve been here and lots more before that. And now they’re building from the plans of a manufactured house they saw when they were in Pennsylvania. She loved it on first sight, she says, but the men are making some changes that they say she’ll love.

I walked over Fox Bridge where I take my “catch and release” mice in their “hav-a-heart” traps. And I walked along the river, beside the corn fields and back to the house where Herb was writing at the butcher block table my parents bought when I moved into my first apartment after college. There was a feather on the grass, with a brilliant yellow shaft.

----

So I am wondering what it is when the things we love, and the gifts we crafted, are sold to someone who doesn't know their story.

I am wondering how it is that the knife we loved to use to cut vegetables becomes just another knife. Or when the only person who knows that there’s a volunteer tomato plant growing in the basket of petunias we were given as a wedding gift is not there to see it bear fruit. Or when the spinning wheel becomes an object to prop in front of the mantle, rather than a tool with that squeak at the crest of the turn and the drive band that pops when the weather is cold and dry..

In Carol’s family home, the original stairs are there. They were stored in the barn, when the center chimney was replaced by a hallway, and the fireplaces that surrounded that chimney were removed.

"I know I am romanticizing it," Carol said. "My husband and son don't want to live there. There's Lyme disease, and my husband is a magnet for ticks. My friend used to say that she feels sorry for people who are attached to a house. And now I know what she means. You have to move; you can’t always live in the same place, and it's your family that matters. And it's just a house after all." And then she added, "My sister thinks it hates her."

What is it to have a home and lose it? And what is it to believe a house so animated that you think it hates you? And what is it to want a house, and live every day in that place of longing, of the belief that the quest will bring you "home"?  And to believe that the house you want, that was destined to be yours is waiting...on the other side of something... a horizon you can't quite see? 

H and I nearly bought a house once. The well was toxic. But it was set back off the road, and there was a lovely kitchen, and we could sit together and watch the changing light through the window with all the small panes of glass. But tonight, I walked to the compost pile at dusk with the peelings from the potatoes, and I saw the mother robin flying off from the nest. As of then, the nest was full.

Herb says this post isn’t finished. He may be right.