Virginia

The Walking Snowflake

/ eponine3 / 17 Comments

Every now and then you come across something that astonishes you beyond expectation. Maybe you have been to a place countless times, you know what’s there and you never tire of it. But suddenly, one time, you see something there you never saw before. It’s a little like watching a movie for the umpteenth time and hearing a line or seeing a look in someone’s eye for the first time, as if it wasn’t there all along, though you know it was.

Only those who watch the same movie over and over again will understand this idea precisely. I know people who won’t watch a movie again. “Oh, I saw that,” they say. But if it’s a good movie with a good story line, good imagery and good transitions from one scene to another, how is watching it again unlike listening again to a song you like  – hearing its composition, having its sounds evoke specific or changing imagery in your mind, marveling at the singer’s voice or the composer’s ability to transition smoothly and beautifully from one part to the next – and appreciating it each time in a new way and liking it again?

Yesterday I went to Yoder’s, my favorite grocery store, for the first time since coronavirus changed our lives. I don’t go there often under normal circumstances. It’s a 45-minute drive and they don’t have everything I need or want. But I love the way this store is not trying to be anything but itself, and it is perfectly comfortable with that. It’s not a chain, it’s not glitzy. They have shoo-fly pie, spelt flour, F.R.O.G. jam (Fig.Raspberry.Orange.Ginger.) and other oddities not found everywhere. They have this saying on the wall in the bathroom. Let us hope some people read it, and some of those take it to heart.

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Yoder’s also has a petting zoo. I have been delighted many times with the way the children love seeing and feeding the goats …

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… the vibrant colors of some of the waterfowl they have …

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… and the wonderful memories that flood my mind whenever I think of the place.

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Kim and I at yoders May 2018.2mp

But yesterday I saw a walking snowflake at Yoder’s and it took my breath away. You might have seen blue and green peacocks (also called peafowl) somewhere in your travels (ah, the pre-corona days when we traveled!). The colors of these feathers seem unreal, painted on.

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But a white peacock? And in his full, front-facing, spread-feather glory no less? This is a sight you don’t see every day!

white peacock Yoder's (2)

This bird is not albino, in case you wondered. If you could get close enough, you’d see blue eyes. He is a genetic variation of the Indian peafowl, hailing from India and Sri Lanka, and could live to be 20 years old. They are found not only in captivity but also in the wild – even the white ones!

This beautiful bird reminded me yesterday that you never know what awaits you around the next bend. I certainly did not plan that Melba and I happened upon it during our visit – I know it’s pure luck to catch this moment in time. We had made the trip in part to celebrate her birthday. The store is fun, the weather was perfect and the chocolate ice cream we had after splitting a Reuben was the best she’s had in a long time, she said. But this surprising, remarkable creature made the day unforgettable.

Kinda makes you wonder what tomorrow will bring!

 

Always a Menace

/ eponine3 / 11 Comments

Last year in early September I was attacked. Normally you wouldn’t think it a problem to stroll along a lovely river on a dirt path. Early mornings in Virginia in the late summer can be scrumptiously warm, so I was wearing a dress. Bad idea. My co-stroller was wearing pants. Way better idea. Those river mosquitoes attacked me with a vengeance, as if there had been a famine and then suddenly fresh meat, free for the taking, came to town. I realized my folly when I got home and decided to count the bites on my legs. I stopped at 30, too depressed to count the rest. Eventually they healed – supreme efforts to leave them alone and supreme weakness resulting in ferocious scratching notwithstanding. By Christmastime they had finally all healed.

Something about the mosquitoes in Virginia is different than the mosquitoes in Vermont, where I lived for 20+ years. Something about the biting kind of insects in general is different. Before moving here 15 years ago, I never had these severe reactions. My first spider bite here took ten months to heal. My first tick bite, four months. It’s a bother. Can I call it Virginia Venom?

After hearing the story of the river walk, my friend Crissie sent me a new shirt. She lives in Caribou, Maine, which is way, way up there. They have black flies, nasty black flies, tiny and annoying and biting black flies. Seems there’s a shirt for that. Small world that I live in, I had had no idea no idea that “repellent apparel” was a thing. But it is. LLBean, based in Maine for over a hundred years, makes the shirt she sent me. It’s so soft, you would never know it had been treated with an active ingredient called “permethrin.” Learn something new every day!

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The shirt got me thinking about menaces. Powerful insects (the ones that have power to make my skin miserable for a time) are a menace. Granted, mosquitoes and black flies are not as much of a menace, nor are they as powerful or invisible a menace as the novel coronavirus we all are scrambling to understand and defend ourselves against. If only there was a shirt we could wear instead of these masks!

But there’s always something, right? Always a menace of some kind. In Vermont I didn’t deal with nasty bugs or the blazing hot and humid days that are common during a Virginia summer. But I did deal with blizzards in March and sometimes, snowfalls in May.  On Saturday, May 9, three days ago, it looked like this in Jeffersonville, Vermont.

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Last year we didn’t have a coronavirus to change our world. It has made me feel super nostalgic lately. I found an old Michael J. Fox movie (For Love or Money) made in 1993. You could have parades in 1993 (or squash festivals in fictitious towns, as the case may be). The average car cost $12,750. A movie ticket cost just over $4. The Pentium microprocessor was introduced by Intel. Canada got its first female prime minister. We could let our children play outside without worrying. I myself was confidently going about my own business, unaware of a menace yet to intrude in my family. But menaces there were. In 1993 an earthquake in India killed nearly 10,000 people. A dilapidated and overcrowded ferry sank in Haiti and as many as 1500 died. The World Health Organization estimated that 14 million people worldwide were infected with AIDS. The WACO disaster happened. Menaces of every ilk sneak into the world with little or no warning.

They always have.

A quick glance through a history book reveals invasions, disasters, wars, heartache, pain, suffering. A teeny sampling: In 1700 B.C. the Hittites invaded Syria. In 111 B.C. war broke out between Rome and Numidia. In 79 A.D. Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the town of Pompeii. In 793 Viking raiders attacked in Northumbria. In 1247 Mongols invaded Japan. In 1348 the Black Death ravaged Europe, killing at least a third of the population. In 1502 the first Africans were taken to become slaves in America. In 1666 the Great Fire of London destroyed more than 13,000 homes. In 1729, opium had become such a problem that the Chinese Emperor Yung Cheng banned it. In 1737 an earthquake in Calcutta killed 300,000 people. In 1918 a worldwide influenza pandemic began, killing tens of millions.

They always will.

Maybe menaces are where the rubber meets the road. Maybe (assuming we survive) they are where we find out what we are made of, where faith grows stronger and we discover or re-discover with more certainty what’s important to us and what’s not.

I’m reading a book about Winston Churchill*. In it the author recounts a letter Churchill wrote to his stockbroker in 1932 when the United States was solidly in the Depression. “I do not think America is going to smash…. If the whole world except the United States sank under the ocean, that community could get its living. They carved it out of the prairies and the forest.” I appreciate that he thought so highly of Americans, but I think he undersold the rest of the world. I do not mean to diminish the tragedy of coronavirus’s impact on many people’s lives, nor the terrible sadness if you know someone who has suffered and died from it. But I admire the dogged determination of humans everywhere to keep going despite the menaces that come along – no matter how harrowing or unpredicted or invisible or dangerous the Menace of the Day may be. We have been on the brink of “the world will never be the same” before. And the world did change. Mightily. But here we are, still chugging along, still finding ways to be good neighbors, still swapping stories, still staring at the stars at night, still loving our families and friends, still caring. May this never change.

 

_______________________________

 

*Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, Martin Gilbert, Macmillan, London, 1981

The Back of the Line

/ eponine3 / 13 Comments

I’m still here. A little shaken two days later, reeling a bit yet actually, if the truth be known, but I live and breathe and I get to enjoy the beautiful colors of Virginia yet another day.

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Did you ever watch one of those movies where an angel-character intervenes and saves someone from imminent disaster? In one of the beginning scenes of The Bishop’s Wife for example, Cary Grant, designated angel, notices a baby carriage that got away from the distracted mother and he pulls it back just before it rolls in front of an oncoming vehicle. Angel to the rescue!

I’m not sure I ever had such a striking example of this sort of thing in my own life as I had two days ago.

Mom had surgery (doing fine). Jerry and I had been visiting her at the hospital that’s less than a mile from where they live. I was taking him home before heading home myself at about 530pm, heavy traffic time. Easy little back route though. Traveled many times.

This little back road meets the main, four-lane road at a light. There are two lanes as you approach the light – a right-turn lane and a straight-or-left-turn lane. To take Jerry home I should have been in the straight-or-left-turn lane. Only momentarily I forgot I was taking him home and got into the right-turn lane.

“You want to go straight,” he said. Oh, right. Duh.

So I looked behind me – no cars – thinking I’d back up slightly and maneuver my way into the correct lane. It didn’t really matter which lane I was in, especially with no other cars waiting for that light to turn, but you are supposed to be in the straight-or-left-turn lane to go straight and you almost always sit at that light for a while, so why not?

Just then the light turned green.

I was not in a position to accelerate on account of having been in the wrong lane and being momentarily distracted by my finagling, so it took me a second or two longer than it should have to begin the crossing of that main road. The hesitation proved a godsend.

Had I been in the correct lane in the first place and accelerated as soon as the light turned green, I would have, as Jerry put it, predeceased him. A red pickup truck came barreling through that intersection in the right-hand lane of the four lanes of the main road – the cars in the other three lanes being at a dead stop, so their light had to be red, not yellow – and would have rammed smack into the side of my car with me and Jerry in it. He was easily going 50 mph.

It would have been a direct hit with me first in line. Did an angel have a hand in this rescue? I don’t know. Thank God for my dimwitted mistake though, that I was in the wrong lane, that I wasn’t ready. You should always look before you accelerate at a light anyway, just in case someone is barreling through, and I might have looked, and that too might have saved us. Instead I just thank God I didn’t give the car gas in that first moment.

Later when I told Mom, reliving with no small agitation the stress of my almost-demise, she said, “It wasn’t your time.” She then said she’s always seen such things as being bumped “to the back of the line.” Who’s next? Your turn? Nope. Git to the back, you!

I never knew she saw it that way, never heard her use that expression before. I like it! As much as I like being at the back of the line, if indeed that’s where I am, which is what I will choose to think at least for some time yet! I am so happy my mom’s nearby, so happy to still be learning about her, learning from her, enjoying her company. In my circle there are too many people who have already lost their moms. I am so blessed in this way and I know it. I love you, Mom!

A Mystery at Royal Orchard

/ eponine3 / 8 Comments

You know how you get invited to an event sometimes that’s outside your normal scope and is either exciting all by itself or exciting because of where it is or who else will be there, and you can hardly wait? And other times you get the invitation and your mouth makes a weird shape – the kind that’s trying to form some variation of Oh, yay! but just can’t because you are at the opposite end of the excitement spectrum? And other times you are smack-dab in the middle and the best you can come up with is Eh or Okay?

I generally veer toward Eh when I am unsure. Combine Vagueness (various aspects of the event are unknown)

with Else (going requires me to switch mental gears)

with Extreme Overall Body Soreness. It has been a week of gung-ho carrying/ placing/ leveling/ finagling 50+ cinder blocks as well as shoveling tons – has to be tons – of dirt and “crusher run.”

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Add an unexpected memorial service to the week and I am ambivalent. But I said I was going so I’m going. I had RSVP’d YES to this thank-you-to-CASA-volunteers event weeks ago. On the upside, it would be a reason to put on something besides overalls, and there would be great food and drink there, and nice people would be commending important work, I was sure of that. And doesn’t it often happen that once you get there, it’s so fun and amazing that you wonder whatever made you hesitate?
But the venue, “Royal Orchard” – never heard of it.

I worked in hospitality for years, a job that requires you to know about local attractions including wineries, breweries, cideries. Royal Orchard kinda sounds like it falls into that general category, don’t you think?

I could have looked it up. I could have asked around. Even if I had, it would not be found in a printed or posted or anyone’s mental listing of local cideries. That’s because Royal Orchard is a private home. They don’t sell apples, they don’t make hard cider, they don’t have a pumpkin patch and they don’t make donuts for tourists, though it turns out they do have a vast network of walking trails open to the public. Who knew?

We turned off the main road onto Royal Orchard Drive and started climbing a single-lane road up, up, up the hillside. Slight curve, serious hairpin, up some more, up, up, up. No mile-markers, but it has to be right. There were no other roads. Suddenly the house appears before you.

This is the Royal Orchard “Big House,” or as much of it as would fit in my camera’s viewfinder. The host of the event, who owns it along with “about a hundred of my cousins,” said his great-grandfather did well (I guess!) in the railroad industry and built the house (or let us more correctly say had the house built) around 1913.

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This is the side driveway. That building way over to the right seemed to be some sort of carriage barn.

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That’s a lot of stone.

The interior is lavishly furnished in period style. This is one of the (I stopped counting at 15) bedrooms.

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This is the view.

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If you adjust the lighting and look carefully at the foreground of the view, you see a curious thing. Four curious things. See them?

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Zooming in doesn’t really help figure out what they are.

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I want to know your guess.

Glorified grain silo? The door has to be around the back.

Primo-natural rock-climbing wall? For the outdoor experience that is not a mountain.

Tomb? The grandfather? But then who are the other three for?

Monument? To those who did all the work? (I can hope!)

Above-ground dungeon? You would not hear the screams from the house.

Newfangled monolith? Who says it has to be just one large, upright stone? These Virginians, they do what they want and call it what they want.

It is a question for the host. It is a question for which, surely, there is a good answer. “I wish I had a better story” is not the answer I was looking for. “We think they just didn’t know what to do with all the leftover stones,” he said.

Huh.

I got to thinking about all the built things I look at and wonder about. Why is it there? Why did they build it like that? Who thought that was a good idea?

Maybe there’s not a good answer.

Maybe there wasn’t a better thing to do. Maybe someone was bored and made the thing absentmindedly. Maybe they goofed. Maybe they were sure it would come out nice and it just didn’t. Maybe they wanted people to wonder in a hundred years: What is it? and be dumbfounded. (Funny little joke – think they’re still laughing??) Maybe they assumed a legend would arise. Maybe not everything is purposeful.

I think someone buried something in there. Not necessarily a corpse, though the Edgar Allen Poe part of my mind has to entertain the possibilities of even gruesomer images. But more like a time capsule. You could argue that the house serves that purpose, and be right, but something more personal maybe.

What would you put in a box and tuck into a stone tower for someone to find in a hundred years?

Ode to Miss D’Uccle

/ eponine3 / 13 Comments

Please note up front: I am not mourning, and if I were, I would not be mourning just any chicken. I know chickens die on a routine basis. I eat them without thinking about it them having died. But it has been a long time since one of my own up and keeled over. They have been heartier than that. They are well protected, well fed, practically pampered (thanks to Sandy who, no doubt, takes secret pleasure in watching them dive after tasty dried mealworms). Miss D’Uccle’s demise is a bit of a mystery.

This is the bird whose fate I relate.

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She was a piece of work, this one. Can you tell? Smallest hen in the flock, full of spitfire, always the one guests asked about because of her fancy coloring and perky attitude. I called her Miss D’Uccle, though technically she was (note past tense ☹) a Mille Fleur D’Uccle, a breed that comes from the Belgian town of Uccle, outside Brussels. Descriptions say they are a “bearded” breed, but I see mostly sideburns, don’t you?

A profile shot better reveals the beard of which she was surely proud.

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The feathered feet are a thing as well. Let the others sport their bare-legged, three-toed-for-all-the-world-to-see business. None of that for her. Miss D’Uccle’s soft brown and white speckled body was complemented beautifully by her perfect red comb (imagine if humans had red combs!).

Just yesterday she was sitting on an egg or two – hers perhaps, and one of the silkie’s probably. (You can never be totally sure unless you nudge them away from the sitting spot and find a warm one underneath, and even then, it’s only a most-likely-it’s-hers situation.)

Did something poisonous bite her? Did she have heart failure or an unknown chicken disease? Or was she sitting because she was brooding, the chicken form of depression? Did her feelings get hurt? Did she decide it’s all just not worth it anymore? We will never know. I went out to collect eggs this afternoon and found her face-in-the-straw. There’s no hope when you are face-in-the-straw.

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Typically in the past, when a chicken dies, we throw it – chickens turn ungendered to me upon death – over the hill, the very steep hill that overlooks many acres of additional woods beyond my property. We do this for two reasons: 1. it’s the easiest thing to do, and we have a lot going on around here, and 2. so some lucky fox or raccoon or hawk can find a free meal and be happy and praise God in their own way. It’s not recycling, it’s full-cycling, giving back. There are perils to such an approach though, as we reviewed at the dinner table when discussing what to do next while said bird remained for the time being in the coop.

Peril #1: The Standing Obstructions. There was the time when Sandy went behind the garden and attempted to throw a dead one down the hill, but it got caught in the crotch of a tree about ten feet up. Likely, when you live next to an unmanicured forest where towering trees, saplings and every height of green woody thing in between fills the space, something solid will get in the way.

Peril #2: The Unexpected Return. There was the time when Bridget, a golden retriever I had, came charging back up the hill with a dead chicken in her mouth. Granted, it should not be surprising when dogs with “retriever” in their name, when dogs famous for, routinely used for, retrieving dead birds in the field should appear having thus retrieved. Nonetheless, you think when you throw a dead bird over the hill, it will stay over the hill! The thing about dead birds is – unless you are going to eat them – you really don’t want to see them again.

Peril #3: The Cannibal-in-Them Emerges. We have not seen this, but we fear it. The same chickens that happily eat anything you throw in their outdoor space, anything, including the leftovers from a chicken dinner (and they will pick those bones clean!), just might have no qualms about a free meal in their own midst, assuming they could get past the feathers. My experience tells me you don’t put anything past chickens.

The disposal alternative to the hopefully-far-flung fling is digging, and digging a hole in Virginia concrete (in other places referred to as dirt or soil), especially after weeks of little rain, involves a pickaxe and rather a good deal of physical labor better applied to porch-building, gardening, etc. All things considered, you find a way to give a free lunch to the wildlife wandering in the woods outside the coop.

Samuel, wanting to avoid the trees-as-catchers problem, said, “I’ll walk it down.” Bless him. That would be a good idea. Pre-walk, however, he was not agreeable to a photo. This is his I’m-not-posing-with-a-dead-chicken photo. Note poor quality of photo with uncooperative subject. And I don’t mean the chicken.

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Being flung into the woods is not the most heart-touching finale to a well-lived life, I’ll grant you. I cannot be accused of over-sentimentality when it comes to my chickens, much as I am amused by them and appreciate their wonderful eggs. (Dogs are another thing, don’t get me started.) But Miss D’Uccle was a good one, and we will miss her. And we didn’t eat her. And here I am ode-ing her, right? That has to count for something.

 

Egg with Tail, Paper Piles and Real Towels

/ eponine3 / 2 Comments

She just didn’t finish. That’s what it looks like to me. The hen that laid the egg with the tail (yes, you read that right) either got bored and distracted and forgot when to pinch off, or it started to hurt and she just eeked through the pain, or she is protesting her egg-laying job but had to get it out anyway. Let it be said that none of us knows exactly what it feels like to plop out an egg, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to get the general idea.

This egg was like the other weakly shelled egg from earlier this summer, squishy just the same, a bit like jello with the thinnest of a crust, just enough crust to keep the yolk and white from making a gooey mess all over the place. Only this one had a tail. What’s up with the chicken that lays such an egg? I wonder which chicken? Miss Old Gray? Don’t-Mess-With-Me White Brahma? Sister Cinnamon Queen?

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I wonder if the same chicken laid both. I wonder why.

I’m thinking it’s one of the Queens. I see an attitude, don’t you?

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Why give an egg a tail? Is it because what else, given her limited physiology, can she do for fun? You know, to let her artistic side run wild? See what they think of this design! Did the chicken misfire or did the misfired shell surprise the chicken? At the Chicken Council will she defend herself with Hey, sisters, really, that shell material had a mind of its own – I didn’t try to make it do that! As if (overall weak shell aside) the hen tried to get the tail to break off and it just wouldn’t? A little like, well, you know. Perhaps the shell proper, taking an autonomous stand, was unwilling or too embarrassed to break off? Or maybe the blame goes back to insufficient shell material in the production line – Hey, Jack, you shorted me! How am I supposed to make a good shell if you short me on the hard stuff?

No getting around it (no pun intended), this egg is unfinished, improper, abnormal.

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There was nothing wrong with the egg inside. I had it for lunch, scrambled with a bit of leftover rice. The shell reduced to a teeny, wet, plastic-bag-like mess once the innards were removed, and that was gross and instantly trash, but the white and yolk were perfectly normal. This egg-with-a-tail anomaly caused me to wonder about other kinds of unfinished business, other things that I never quite wrap up in a neat little package and call DONE, like mail and laundry, and that led to fond memories of systems-that-work-but-are-somehow-unimplemented and environmental consciousness. Bear with me.

Mail: It’s true they don’t send as many catalogs as they used to, increased postage having changed that game. My paper piles don’t get as high and toppling as they used to. A lot of bills come electronically now, and they send you ads online instead. Last week I was looking at websites for outdoor furniture because sooner or later I will have a finished porch (speaking of unfinished business!) and later, while reading a New York Times article, up popped an ad for the very chair I had been looking at. That’s just plain creepy. I assume it’s legal for some program to be tracking my views, and I know it happens all the time and waaaaaay more than I know, but I don’t like it a bit. I think I’d rather deal with the pile!

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Still, I can’t blame my pile(s) on the creepy internet. In the mix you’d find checks I don’t know what to do with after I have mobile-deposited them (can I really throw them away?), receipts for the next time I do taxes, that great garlic-planting guide Tracy gave me (I’m going to need that in October), the really nice visitor’s guide from when I was at the Ringling Museum in April, bank statements (I still get some in paper form), to-do lists (I still write them to keep myself on track and I sometimes like looking back on them to see Oh, look how much was accomplished! – though be assured I do throw the shopping lists away after the shopping trip), random business cards, occasional invitations that are too pretty to throw away (and isn’t it somehow disrespectful to throw them away?)…

What kills me is that I have had, have used and have benefited from a perfectly good system for dealing with such random papers – a filing system! You get plain pocket folders (a variety of colors is more fun) and label them Bank, Garden, Travel, Projects, etc., and then you put the lists, receipts, etc., in the corresponding folder, which then goes in a file box somewhere handy. How hard is that?? No paper piles need exist at all!

I could say it’s hard right now because of living in a construction/ undone/ upside-down zone. Three rooms of my house need sheetrock work. Here’s one.

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The foyer houses a lot of tools and construction materials because you can’t run downstairs every time you need a different level or drill bit. And if you can call the new porch a room, that makes four undone zones – two of the three new sets of windows are in but not trimmed…

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…roof is on but not siding, some new ceiling lights now (as of yesterday!) turn on and some ceiling plywood is up but not all, and not all lights are in, and I still have not picked out the fans, and some of the old cedar siding is planed (to become ceiling material over the plywood) but not all, etc.

It’s a mess. A work-in-progress, I-begin-to-see-the-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel mess. A beautiful-vision-in-my-mind mess. Can a person be expected to maintain neat file folders under such circumstances?

Excuses, excuses! I hear you! Try living in my house, you say.

So-and-so (no names) adds to the mess / takes all my time / distracts me unspeakably!

My job is so demanding right now!

If only the people who said they would do the work would actually do the work!

Truth be told, I myself can never remember to buy the pocket folders! All right, all right, I’ll put them on the list. Now where was that list?

Laundry: When do we come to the end of laundry?! I operate a little b&b, so there are always sheets and towels, to say nothing of my other life and the sawdusty clothes from porch-building and oh-yeah-my-other-life the inside-out workout pants that I love.

But I don’t really mind. I even hang my laundry on a wonderful outdoor clothesline most of the time. There is nothing under the sun like sleeping on sheets that have dried in a sunshiny breeze. (I do not hang bath towels – they do need to fluff up in the dryer.)

There is in fact one portion of my laundry that I am even proud of in a way only some of you will understand.

I am not one for paper towels any more than necessary, nor throwaway wipes and that sort of thing. There is something about using a real piece of cloth that is fully intended to get dirty and be the thing between my hand and a mess I have to clean up, something about the softness of the cloth coupled with its toughness/ reuseableness/ tried-and-trueness. There is a difference between a real towel vs. something that tries to be a real towel.

Imagine my delight when I read in A Boat, A Whale and A Walrus (lovely birthday present cookbook from my daughter) by Seattle restaurant owner and entrepreneur Renee Erickson:

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REAL TOWELS

I’m a fan of towels – not the paper kind, but real cloth towels, the kind you hang from your oven door. At home I keep a huge wicker bin of them next to my oven, and I use them in lieu of paper towels, to mop up messes, blot food and soak up excess liquid wherever it appears. I accumulate them when I travel, mostly, but especially in Parisian antique markets. They’re pretty, and they’re washable. And because living in the restaurant world inevitably means making a lot of waste, it makes me feel good to use a little less paper at home.

I did not acquire my own cloths at Parisian antique markets, nor are they all the same. Some are terry, some soft knit, some woven cotton, some gauzy. They are my go-to for cleaning, for spills, for drying things, for polishing things. If they are rendered trash – such as when you use them to mink-oil your shoes – so be it. There are always more. Most of the time they go in the wash (thereby adding to the laundry, yes, but I am going to do laundry anyway, and so are you) and go back in my rag drawer. I can only imagine having space in my kitchen for a huge wicker bin of them.

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I wish I had a way to know how many paper towels I have not used over the years. I wish I knew the amount of money I have saved by not buying massive packs of them or could see the still-empty corner of a landfill that’s not filled with just my lifetime’s worth of them. I know someone else’s use of paper towels will fill that corner. I know that what I don’t use in a lifetime is probably what a football stadium, say, accumulates during one event. I certainly use paper towels sometimes.

Still, every time a paper towel is just the thing (such as on the plate I am about to transfer crispy bacon to from the hot pan), I pause and see mountains of trash in my mind, with bulldozers pushing it around to try to make room for more and more coming day after day, and I say to myself it’s okay this time. The “leave as little a footprint as possible” directive was intended for campers at first if I remember right: Take away anything you bring to the campsite, allowing the next camper to enjoy the natural environment as much as possible (instead of having to deal with your leftover stuff). To me this applies to everyday life too and to the big picture of my footprint on the environment. I am responsible for mine, after all, not someone else’s. I do what I can to be a good steward of my resources, earth’s resources. And a part of me is very satisfied about that.

As the chicken was probably satisfied. Hey, doing the best I can here!

It Smells Like Earth

/ eponine3 / 11 Comments

This morning as I made my bed, I again smiled at a gift I received last year, a small pillow filled with I don’t know – pieces of pinecone? I picked it up, held it to my face and breathed deeply in. The earthy scent of the filling filled me. My eyes closed, my body relaxed, my smile broadened.

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Gabi wrote a note to explain the un-ordinary pillow. It helps us get a good sleep, she said. Just have it near you in bed. Why would someone want a pillow filled with forest material? Why would I want one?

Trees stand tall all around me, some towering over 100 feet. Giants they are. This time of year my windows are wide open. Cool freshness wafts in. I hear birds chirping, squirrels chittering, insects singing, an occasional train in the distance rumbling, not much else except my confused hen (the one that thinks she’s a rooster) sometimes crowing.

Yet I love this pillow. And if I love it, I who live in the country, I can only imagine how other people in other settings might love the scent of earth at the ready, packaged neatly and freely evoking thoughts of earth’s predictable-yet-always-slightly-different cycles, of forest filled with boundless unseen dramas, of blessed, beautiful trees with fluttery leaf dances so high up.

I wonder how a pillow like this strikes a person who lives near the sea, where saltiness would pervade the air, water would predominate the landscape and the rushing, ebbing, flowing tides, rustling dune grasses and hungry shore birds would replace the forest sounds. The waterfront scene is as lovely as the forest, some would say as lovely as the sea of waving grass in the plains or the jagged, white peaks of high mountains. All these places can be our connection to earth, to the intelligent design it presents, to things we often hardly give thought to – how magical and majestic are these natural wonders, how awesome and complex is the schematic that includes all the moving parts of this picture, how utterly spectacular is a sky that is different every single sunset and sunrise.

What do people do who do not have the natural world in their everyday life? I don’t mean you have to have a forest around you or a vast body of water in your sightline. I mean just a piece of nature, like Rachel’s pawpaw trees.

Once I had guests at the cottage, parents and two middle-school-age daughters. As we were exploring the garden, the mother said, “Girls, this is nature.” To me, quietly, she said, “The closest we get to nature is the fruit bowl on the counter.”  Oh, dear, can this be true?

Maybe nature – the wondrous creation of things not-man-made – doesn’t speak to other people the same way it speaks to me. Maybe I just want to think it has a lot to say if only we hear and listen, look and see, touch and feel. The older I get, the more I think there’s more to everything than we can ever know, and that makes it not only endlessly unboring, but also ever able to teach us something new, something we need to know, something that helps or serves something else. Maybe I just hope it.

One Determined Marigold

/ eponine3 / 6 Comments

Various people in my world are struggling. Some have chronic pain. Some have jobs that make them crazy. Some feel creaky, obsolete, scared, unwanted, frustrated or alone. All of them are like my one little marigold.

Apart from certain, strangely-not-completely-out-of-control areas, my garden is a mess this year. I’ve had some perfect veggies, enough for the marginal labor to have been worthwhile, but roughly half of the space qualifies as a jungle. With the front porch project I simply haven’t had the time. Plus this aggravating shoulder of mine, unimproved after three weeks of physical therapy (maybe worse), holds me back.

Still, I like fresh green pepper on my pizza and Samuel said he’d make some the other day. My contribution amounted to walking to the garden for a pepper. The jungle mess did not encourage lollygagging – it wants to get about its wild business without critical observers – so I got my pepper and was about to leave when a spot of gold caught my eye.

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There it was, one single marigold, standing tall and beautiful despite the choking weeds not far away. I had not planted it. I am unconventional in a list of ways, but it would not even occur to me to plant a flower in the middle of a path. One of the seeds from last year’s lovely crop must have found its way to this spot.

In August of last year the marigolds I did plant were huge and just beginning to blossom. My granddaughter Rise, five years old at the time, sweetly gives you the idea how tall they were.

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By September they were so full and heavy they fell over with gorgeous weight.

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This year I planted gourds instead, and some of them are remarkable (see the one hanging in the upper left? it keeps getting bigger!), but no zinnias, marigolds, asters or any other purely-for-color-and-show plants. Yet here is this one flower – standing strong, beautiful in its own way, determined – despite the mess – to have its moment.

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What a lovely parallel. Just like each person I know who is not in ideal circumstances presently, each person struggling with this or that, my one marigold is determined to

Stand strong: It’s hard to endure pain! It’s hard to have no time for yourself, or be far from those you love, or go to a job that feels dead-endish or keep up your end of a deal when those around you slough off. It’s hard to see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, to remain positive when you feel like crap, to hold your tongue when someone is out of line, to go to the gym when you feel weak, to push through when you want to stay in your comfy little cave. Yet all around me I see people standing strong just like this marigold. It doesn’t care that it’s the only one. It proudly manages feeling like the first grader in the college class, being the newbie on the block, saying the words that are hard to say. Bravo, little marigold!

Be beautiful: See all the green around the marigold? The scene of mostly weeds (other than that one funky gourd) sets the stage for this one determined flower to shine. In our own mess of life, in the chaos or worry or disharmony we endure more often than we would like to, it’s easy to simply become part of the mess, to add to it, to blend in and become invisible. Instead we can choose to be the marigold – at least sometimes – and be other, be radiant, be beautiful.

Have its moment: The older you get, the more fleeting time proves itself to be. Time is so limited. Resources are so limited. So what. None of us will be here forever, or do everything we want to do or reach all of our goals. We are bound by our bodies, our relationships, our location, our circumstances, our education, our wisdom (or lack thereof). Bound. Having a bum shoulder has made me think a lot about the elusive thing we call equality. I can’t do what I want to do! I have a disadvantage compared to people with good shoulders! (Funny how you see things like good shoulders that you didn’t see before!) But this shoulder is mine, for better or worse. I own it. It is unique to me and limits me in ways I wish I could change right now. Alas, we do what we can while we can with what we have. This little marigold will be seen and admired by precious few people before it succumbs to the frost in a few months. No matter. In this season, this year, in this place, it will be like a gem in the dirt, determined to have its moment and do what it can despite its limitations.

I wonder if it grew in this spot just to bring these ideas to me.

Geocache on a Pinecone

/ eponine3 / 8 Comments

Why do people traipse through forests? Hiking maybe? Hunting? Birdwatching? I expected my next foray into the woods to be a search for small dead cedar trees to use as poles. We need some small poles around here. Never before has it been my goal to find a mysterious object, investigate it, write in it, put it back and walk away. But that’s what geocaching is all about.

If you have never heard of geocaching, join the crowd. From the few people we talked to about it last week, it seems you’re either really into it (or know someone who is) or you’ve never heard of it.

My sister Lynn was here for a visit with her daughter Erika and granddaughters Kaileena (11) and Brea (5). We decided to explore some of the pristine lakes in this part of Virginia, having been motivated in part by a free-entry-pass that came in the mail (these promos do work sometimes!). On the way to Sherando Lake in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Erika mentioned that they had what you could call a mission while in Virginia – finding a geocache in which to put a little “travel bug.” You’re doing what? Mom said.

This is Sherando Lake. Ooh, so perfect.

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Kaileena’s “travel bug” is plastic, the size of a large coin or a key ring and has a cartoony dragon image on it. It was found at a geocache in Southwick, Massachusetts, by Kaileena’s Girl Scout troop leader, Lisa, who handed it off to Kaileena when she found out about the trip to Virginia. The idea is to give this little bug/trinket a ride from there to here to some other place eventually, and in doing so, connect with fellow-geocachers in a worldwide hide-and-seek adventure. Every cache is some version of a little treasure chest and contains a list of who has been there. Some of the caches also contain a constantly changing array of trinkets like Kaileena’s dragon, placed there for the next person to find.

For geocaching though, peaceful and picturesque Sherando Lake was a bust. We had fun there, don’t get me wrong. The weather was splendid, as you can see. Mom clearly demonstrated You are never too old to be silly with a fishing net!

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Kaileena and Brea spent hours in the water — til they were “prunes,” as Mom says. And we watched some people throwing a watermelon around in a water game – one presumes there were rules, but I cannot be sure. See the watermelon? The guy with the open hand had just thrown it. Or maybe he’s trying to catch it?

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Alas, geocaching – along with so many other activities nowadays – requires internet. Zeroing in on a specific cache online gets you exact (longitudinal and latitudinal) coordinates that take you to within 16 feet of the cache. Erika had checked the online global geocaching map and knew there were some caches near Sherando Lake, but of course they are not out in the open – what would be the fun of that!? By the time we got to the lake, we had no signal. She even drove to a parking lot next to the fishing end of the lake, but mountains will be mountains and will sometimes very effectively block signals.

We had better luck at Walnut Creek the next day. A county park closer to home, Walnut Creek is almost as pretty as Sherando Lake.

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The lifeguards told us internet was sketchy here too, but “See those two little pine trees up on the hill? Try there.”

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They are hard to see in the shadow, but Erika, Kaileena and I trekked up toward them anyway …

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… and sure enough, service! Terrible service, make no doubt, but as we all know, one bar is better than no bars. Within a quarter mile, the coordinates told us, up the hill more, to the right and through the woods, we would find the cache. Erika switched to compass mode on her phone and off we went, following the arrow. It tells you almost step by step how close you now are.

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No two caches will look the same. When on the search, as you make your way toward the hidden or not-quite-hidden cache, the thing to look for is something odd, something out of place, something not as it should be. Hmmm, here we were, branches snapping underfoot, clueless about any specifics to look for other than “it will look wrong.” See how on top of the phone it says “One of these things is not like the o…” We knew ahead of time that this cache was a micro-cache, meaning it would be too small to put the bug into, but we were determined to find it anyway (challenging as that might be!).

We got to where Erika’s arrow stopped. “We are within 16 feet. It’s got to be here somewhere.” Miraculously, she suddenly found it – a pinecone hanging at eye level from a branch with fishing line (which is not as pinecones should be hanging from trees). “One of these things is not like the o…” has to mean “One of these branches [from which a pinecone hangs] is not like the others.”  Hanging right underneath the pinecone, a little cache. Ta-da!!

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Closer up, the pinecone looked like this. See the little cache hanging off it? See the fishing line above?

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This little waterproof case holds a paper list of those who have stopped by.

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Both Kaileena and Erika added their info. Erika then re-rolled-up the list, tucked it back in, screwed the lid on and put it back on the pinecone. That’s it, folks! Quite the lovely view we had from the top of that hill…

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… but back to the lakeside beach we went.

What about the dragon-bug, you ask? (I knew you didn’t forget.) The next day, Erika and Kaileena got new coordinates, found a box in a stone wall near the hospital in Charlottesville, deposited the bug and signed their code names. The box was a bit worn and shabby, could stand to be replaced, so Erika added a note to the online info about this particular cache. Someone else will come along sooner or later and replace the box hopefully, and maybe even decide to give that bug a ride and take it elsewhere.

Who knows where it will land next!

 

Enough is As Good As a [ _____ ]

/ eponine3 / 6 Comments

When Claudia visited in 2016, her first trip to the states in a few decades, we were acutely aware of how rare and precious our time together was. You know how it is – time flies with dear friends. You want to do everything you’ve been talking about for so long: Let’s make that no-knead bread and the homemade mozzarella cheese and a salad so you can dress it the way I love, oh and let me show you how we make our pizza now. Let’s watch Downton Abbey and Witness and The Lives of Others – and have you seen The IT Crowd? (Both stupid and hilarious, for when we just want to laugh!) Monticello is nearby, and Yoder’s, and the downtown pedestrian mall that’s so much like Burlington’s, and don’t forget Barboursville Vineyards with its cool stone ruins of Governor Barbour’s mansion. Let’s take walks in the morning when it’s brisk and in the daytime when the sun is warm and in the evening when the sun glows in the western sky – oh, yes, and Humpback Rocks is a great hike, best in the evening (not like Tirol, okay, but for Virginia, a great hike!).

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We had only nine days. And when I had asked her ahead of time what she wanted to do when she came, she replied with one word: “Rest.”

So let’s, instead, be real. Life comes down to choices, right? As I lamented, she comforted: Zu viel nimmt weg von genug, which I wrote down on a post-it, duly translated and left stuck on the side of my fridge.

Too much takes away from enough.

You could play with the translation and say Too much is worse than enough or Too much negates enough. The idea made sense – if we try to do too much, the time will not be restful, we’ll make ourselves crazy, we’ll miss the balance. And the German had a nice cadence to it. But the verbatim translation didn’t quite work for me. It stuck in my mouth somehow. And it never occurred to me to flip it around and put “enough” at the beginning.

This past week I got help from Mary Poppins. As I watched my five-year-old great niece giggling her way through this classic, I stumbled on a translation of Zu viel nimmt weg von genug that I’d missed the last, oh, say, five times I watched this movie. After the bit of nursery magic when all the toys and clothes dance and bounce and jump around, finding their way into drawers and cabinets and closets, converting the room from messy to tidy in a few delightful minutes, Jane and Michael wanted to do it again. More magic! More fun! How can that be bad? Mary Poppins drew the line in her practically-perfect, matter-of-fact way: “Enough is as good as a feast.” Click on the link to watch her say it.

Well, look at that! In 1910, the setting for this film, they too were struggling with When is enough? Where is the line? Clearly this is not a new problem. Well before that, people in biblical times were likewise advised about moderation. Have you found honey? Eat only what you need…. (Proverbs 25:16)

The idea of potential excess, should-I-or-shouldn’t-I-cross-that-line, comes up all the time.

What fills a day (or nine days)? Activity, yes, but how much is enough to be fun and satisfying yet avoid utter exhaustion?

What fills a house? Stuff, but how much is enough to fend off clutter and inundation?

What fills our bellies? Food and drink, but how much is enough for good health? How much crosses the line?

Decisions. Every day I have to make hard decisions – not every day as in on a daily basis, no, I mean continually    throughout    every    day – what to say yes to, what to spend money on, what to put in my mouth. Abundance has a downside, some would say a curse.

Funny, we don’t have trouble deciding how long to stand there rubbing our hands together with the soap before we decide they are clean enough. We know when’s enough. We’re pretty good about knowing how fast to drive (we value our lives), how much physical space should exist between us and the person standing next to us (how close would be too close), how many toppings we want to put on our pizza (how many would be too many), when we’ve been sitting too long (need to move!), when enough time has passed since we last heard from an old friend (time to send a message). How come that same mostly-good judgment can’t apply so nonchalantly and easily to (pick a temptation, any temptation) shall we say ice cream?!

While standing in line to get ice cream recently, the person next to me ordered a small but said out loud while staring at the price list that looked something like this,

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“I want the super-size.”

Aren’t people the same no matter what year it is!?

A friend who was watching her weight once told me that a small scoop of ice cream didn’t taste better than a large bowlful, and that when she had less, she savored it more – or at least she was trying to train herself to think this way!

Maybe training is the answer. We can train ourselves (or be trained) to do new tasks at work. We adapt to new surroundings or circumstances with a bit of self-talk. It’s an idea.

Hmmm, but I like a feast as well as anyone. (We have only nine days! … That bread is fresh now! … I really like that bowl/table/shirt/game/book/gadget!)

How about mental gymnastics? Maybe I could reconfigure the feast, spread it out over time a bit or have one a little less often?

I hear once again my wise professor’s words. The topic at the time was bacon: Should I eat it? Shouldn’t I? How much? He calmly said three words: Balance. Variety, Moderation. Is it really that simple? Maybe.