Birthday Gift

For my birthday a couple of months ago, my daughter gave me a certificate good for a couple of hours of computer help. I am not exactly computer illiterate, but I have many questions about how to manage files, how to accomplish tasks more easily. What I really pined for was a kind of ' handy man' who would make my computer clean and lean and answer my dumb questions. My daughter does not have a lot of time. She runs a business, works in other jobs part time, tutors, and is the mother of a toddler.

But this weekend she came with her son who loves the ranch and has spent many weekends alone with us. Having the two of them together here was certainly a gift, but when Quincy went down for a nap we went to my studio and the computer there.

"Now, Mom, I know this is a lot like reorganizing your underwear drawer," she says as she is swiftly deleting unwanted files. "Says here you haven't used this since '06. It's gone." She carefully shows me through a few new ways of doing things. But she is really appalled at my lack of organization. "Why haven't you put all these similar things in one file?" We make a lot of new files and fill them with similar things. I cringe (she is in my underwear drawer) and wonder what horrid dogeared thing she'll find next. I have always been such a private person, though there are no skeletons that I know of.

She insisted on taking my whole photo file of thousands of pictures, loaded onto a flash drive. She'll organize these. I am uncomfortable with the enormity of this task, asking anyone to do it. But she says she loves doing this. She is the family anthropologist, nosey since birth, and I know she'll enjoy going through years of my photos. She'll put all my arts photos where they belong, she'll arrange all those photos of wildflowers, and she'll put all the family events in some kind of order. Because she's my daughter and so close, she'll delete the terrible pictures. This is a gift beyond all imagining.

The worm turns. I remember the actual act of helping her (making her!) get some organization into her physical space. "Clean your room today!" But mostly, I was respectful of her space, and when I could not stand the mess, I would quietly close the door.

I remember when she was as young as Quincy and I catered to her every need. I had no idea then that she would one day be a fan tastically competent and organized adult who could or would want to teach me things. I see her son, Quincy, now- today by turns wonderful and horrid. I remember his mother at this point. Could I have believed that this baby woman would one day be this wonderful young woman, so generous and curious and able? And so she has turned out. I am priviledged to have this daughter I love so much.

Mutant cosmos, Frogs in the Shower, and Lovebugs

In the spring when the raised flower beds were flowering in lovely abundance, I planted cosmos seeds here and there so that they would be blooming just when the petunias and pansies and zinnias would be dead with the heat. I imagined their delicate lacy foliage with purple and orange blooms, not needing much attention, but keeping the flower beds in focus. I began to notice the cosmos growing up through the red sage and the Mexican Petunias.

As the heat and wet of summer went on (and on), the cosmos grew taller and taller but there was not a suggestion of anything blooming on them. Occasionally some of the heavy stalks would keel over with their own weight, but not daunted they would spring up again. In August the cosmos plants were at least six feet tall. By early September they were approaching ten feet. I was intrigued enough to let them stay until I could see what would happen. No blooms. The stems of these plants by now had the diameters of small redwood trees and it would require a chain saw to remove them. We were beginning to think that these were not cosmos at all, but some horrible mutant invasive species that should be chopped down and burned asap.

Yesterday they began to bloom. They are actually the most unpleasant plant I have ever let live. At about twelve feet tall, dwarfing everything else in the yard, they have very small unattractive orange blossoms waving crazily about at the tops. I purchased the seeds at Walmart.

As the giant mutant cosmos bloomed the green frogs appeared. I hear Andy whimpering from the bathroom where he is preparing to shower. We all have our roles and mine is to catch the wildlife inside the house. The shower is full of frogs. I am pretty good at catching them and putting them outside. I let the gecko stay because I have always liked knowing that my home is guarded by these funny creatures. I go back to the kitchen where I am sweeping the palmetto bugs out the door. This is like some really strange sport (water bug polo?)

Later, as the day heats up, I realize that we are in love bug season again. Love bug season is kind of like the fall NPR fundraisers; you hate that period but you know you can last it out if you keep your legs crossed and think of the Queen. No one I have ever known of has ever discovered anything good about love bugs or what their niche is in the ecology of Florida.

But this night there is a full moon and the sky is clear. As is our habit, we walk the fields with our dog and rejoice that we have a place in the natural world, however strange.

Kids' Nation

Grandma Molly is whining tonight. I have just watched the reality t.v. show about forty kids in a cold desert, making their way for six weeks without adults. Yeah, I've read "Lord of the Flies", and as a teacher with more than forty years experience, I have often fantasized about what would happen to any group of kids I know if they had to make it on their own. It wouldn't be pretty.

I have several problems with this show's concept. First, I wonder WHAT were their parents thinking? Are we Americans so mesmerized with having our kids in the spotlight and out there as objects that we have lost our senses? Do these parents think that putting their kids in a competitive situation on national t.v. for $20,000 is what it's all about? What happened to family values? Maybe these are the same parents who put their little girls up to be Miss Sunshine in a beauty pageant, or got them into modeling. One child was described as being a spelling bee finalist, not so different.

It is ridiculous to think that these kids were really out there all alone and making life decisions. They were surrounded with camera booms and a huge trailer city of t.v. folks. The M.C. periodically appeared to pull things together. (and hand out gold stars and $2o,000 checks.) There was a helicopter pad. The kids were obviously chosen for their cuteness. There were no mean girls or aggressive boys. And, really, would you like to see your neighborhood bully or gang member on t.v.? The kids are all ethnicities, all adorable, just like in the commercials we see all the time on t.v.

This show was charming in a way; the kids were so appealing with their shiny hair and Gap clothes and straight teeth and articulate speech. This was not reality. (Real kids of this age do not bathe, their feet stink, and their hair is lank.)

What reality is in the best possible middle class world is a family going camping together. The kids help catch the fish and cook it, with the help and direction from Mom and Dad. Everyone sleeps in tents on the ground, and if it rains torrentially, it is an adventure for all. The youngest child who might be eight years old, (or eleven or twelve!), scared, and takes comfort from his folks who cuddle him in the dark and reassure him about this world. These parents know that this is a little guy (or girl) who needs to embedded in a family. This small creature does not need to be a t.v. star prematurely. On Kids' Nation, even those precocious, parent propelled kids, were worried about the opportunity they had to take a crap. What are we thinking?

So I am whining tonight. I am thinking about Quincy, our almost three year old grandson. He's cute enough and social enough to be a model on t.v. But what really interests him is looking at lizards, pretending to drive the tractor, and dipping into the reality of being with Grandpa and Grandma on the ranch. Someday he might want to go to sleep-away summer camp, as his mother happily did for many summers. But there will be no helicopters there, no t.v cameras. He'll just learn from friendly adults about wildlife, cooking, fire building, horses, or whatever.

If you watched this program, what do you think?

The Diddle Factor

When Andy and I were working full time and the sprawling house was full of children, friends and dogs and schedules and things to
be done I fantasized about having a place to live that was pure white, no kids, no dog hair, no maintenance issues, I could be an orphan stripped of family. I would eat only exquisite pale green vegetables, ordered in when I wanted. There would be nothing needing attention and I could read, lying supine on the white sofa as long as I wanted. When I wanted to leave I could just go out and lock the door behind me. Pure fantasy.

Actually, we do now own a townhouse in the city, and it is almost white. It requires very little energy, maybe a half hour a month to vacuum and clean the bathrooms. It is stylish and well-equipped. We can close the front door and be gone for weeks at a time knowing it will be exactly the same when we return. The automatic watering system comes on a couple of times a week to irrigate the tiny garden. The air conditioning system keeps the whole place at 82 degrees when no one is at home. Since it is totally hermetically sealed, very little dust accumulates. This place is not home, and, for me, just a place to be occasionally, and a little bit better than a hotel. But we can't give it up!

The diddle factor is something one might not think about when you are so exhausted by the details of life. But you retire from your daily work. What do you do now everyday? You are not required to drive kids to soccer or to the orthodondist. You don't have to get up before the first light to get in your run or swim before work. You don't have to slump over your computer late into every night preparing lesson plans or responding to e-mails from clients. FREEDOM!

There you could be in your stylish condo with very little to do. You can water the plants. You could go out to lunch every day with friends. You could attend concerts and plays in the evenings.. You could volunteer as a symphony greeter. You could shop, though not many of us who are retired and prosperous have any need for things. We've got everything we need. You could travel constantly as many retirees do. I think that this is just postponing the hard work of figuring out what we want our last best years to hold for us.

We have been flopping around being retirees for this last year. It isn't pretty. We are addressing a deficit of creative energy. Andy has made many exquisite pieces of furniture in his shop. In the last year he has made chests of drawers, tables, benches, stools, toys and shelves. I have made quilts, clothes for my granddaughter, paintings, rugs and pottery. Our creations are not yet professional quality. We are learning.

We are enjoying our grandchildren, though toddlers are incredible time consumers!

And we have the needs of our various volunteer activities seeping into our lives, sometimes for many hours a week. These activities are the most meaningful to us. We can use our honed expertise to advance the causes we believe in.

In our real home at the ranch, not at the pristine white place in town, there is always something to be done. The pastures need to be mowed, the fences mended, the fruit trees pruned, the vegetable and flower beds weeded and watered, the cattle culled. There is so much pure space to be explored! Our work clothes have to be laundered and meals must be prepared for us and the many guests we have.

This is the diddle factor. We need to have things to do that are hard and take time, creativity and concentration. There was this huge thing before we retired that was paid work for hours and hours every week. We squeezed in the extra stuff: maintaining our houses, cooking meals, scheduling family and friends and community. When we retire we have to address the deficit of all the rest of stuff we wanted to do but never had the time for.

Living in the pristine white house that needs nothing is a bad choice for retirees. There is no diddle factor.

Remembering 9/11 in 2007

I have no picture today, but I look at the sky this evening as the day wanes and it is very like that Tuesday: rain and heavy clouds. But back then I was walking in the pastures, weeping for the future.

Tonight I have just watched the general and the ambassador and the senators, the 'suits', trying to make sense out of all this mess. How can anyone?

I remember driving across the middle east with my father when I was a seventeen year old. There were four of us; my dad, my two brothers, one a bit older and one a bit younger, and me. We drove on dirt roads through the back of Turkey, then into Syria and on into Lebanon where we were going to live for more than a year. This was not your cruise ship tour.

Going through the small villages we saw many cafes with men sitting outside playing some kind of board game (backgammon? dominoes?). These men often had shaved heads. The children, (never girls) who might be there too, also had shaved heads. We saw this scene over and over- men doing nothing. My siblings and I began to refer to them as "drones". I wondered where all the women and girls were. These people were not at all interested in us or at all welcoming though probably few Americans had ever been to their villages. These people were the most foreign people I have ever seen. There was absolutely no point of contact. When we wanted to buy some bottled water and pointed to a likely looking container, they sold us ice cold ouzo ( a highly alcoholic brew). Try drinking that when you have been eating the dust on the road for a few hours!

We didn't expect much. My father expounded (as he often did) on the differences in cultures. It sounded like blah blah to us. We were too young, too embedded in being Americans.

Living in Beirut was a wonderful cornucopia of senses. The city was building, as it always is, and the smells of fresh concrete, flowering trees and kibbi, the platters of spicy ground meat coming from communal ovens, the leathery smells from the shoemakers were my world. I loved going to school with Arabs. I loved spending time with Lebanese families. But these Arabs were from Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and other places where parents were progressive and wanted to have their children prepared for going to universities in Europe and the United States. I had never heard of girls wearing burkas, or even head scarves.

My older brother soon left to go and study at the Sorbonne. So I was the oldest now.

My dad wanted me to travel with him on his occasional trips to Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. He was on a fellowship to study archaeology. We'd go to small cities and towns and he'd give a lecture on the local archaeology and I would do the slide show. These trips were always interesting, sometimes alarming. It is hard to imagine now, that someone in our State Department at one time thought that having a prominent classicist give lectures in small middle east cities was a good idea. I do remember that the lecture hall was always packed and that there were many more questions than my dad had time to answer.

The people who came to the lectures were not drones.

It was an easier time then. I was in awe of Mesopotamia. I grew up thinking about the Cradle of Civilization. There were so many incredible ideas, artifacts and tracks of the first best civilization. In those lecture halls the Iraqis were lovely and responsive and proud. It was slow with the translator.

But as soon as we began to drive across the unremittingly hot desert, through the small settlements, I saw the "drones". I do not understand these people, the Iraqis, the Sunnis, Shias.

Tonight I watch the "suits", the senators and generals, talk about what to do about Iraq. I do not think they have a clue about the culture they are dealing with. Sometimes it looks like us, but this is a mirage. Islam is opaque to us. They need to find their own solutions. I cannot imagine what we were thinking in going to war in Iraq. We have wrecked the infrastructure, the society, the natural life, and the irreplaceable historical artifacts of a whole country. And we have let thousands be killed.

I hope you are reading "A Thousand Splendid Suns". Makes you think, you and I, self-satisfied Americans.

Ranch Life

The cowboys and dogs came today to work the cows. The horses arrived in a trailer with the dogs who were on their toes and excited to be able to run around and herd the beasts from the pasture into the chute. We went in the truck to the cattle pens to see the action. It was raining lightly and there was a magnificent rainbow in the late afternoon sun.

Half the herd of forty, the calves, were going into trailers to tomorrow's cattle auction. The breeding cows were treated for the various pests cows get. Tonight, the calves will stay in a pen at the auction center with water and feed. Those calves are now really big and buff, and I am ready to see them go. Their mammas are now bellowing in the long pasture, missing their offspring. Curly, the bull, looks relieved. Beef prices are up.

All the late summer during the rainy season, the pastures have beeen mowed and groomed. The grass is thick. Warren, the ranch manager, is proud of his herd and the work he has done to revamp the cattle pens and the fences. He loves this place!

So do I! It still seems so magical and unbelievable that I live here. It often seems to me that the big adventure of the day is being able to watch that huge golden orb weaver spider quickly wrapping up a yellow sulpher butterfly that unfortunately blundered into her web. Or checking out that fence lizard that lives under the tractor. Or finally being able to put a name to that cobalt blue wildflower I see on my daily forays. (Curley top sage) By our entrance gate I love (and hate) to see the red shouldered hawk zoom down for a rabbit.

This is the first entire summer we have actually lived here full time. It has been as hot as the inside of a dragon's mouth, though at night we do not use the a/c because it does cool down. Despite the heat, I have loved beginning to know the rhythms of country life. I have learned a lot about butterflies and caterpillars, birds, reptiles. I am constantly checking my guide books, doing a unit on Florida ecology.

A couple of days ago I went to the feed store to see if they had collard plants yet and met up with a couple of local families I know from Lacoochee School. They were buying rabbit and pig feed and were also looking for collards. "Miss Molly! Are you coming back to school? When can we come to visit at the ranch again?" I am beginning to feel embedded here.

The salad garden is up, the tomatoes are looking good, and as far as I know, there is no hurricane on the horizon.

I hear foxes barking and the intimate ululations of the screech owls. The night sky, unpoluted with man's lights, is limitless.

Gardening Time

I am thinking about great vegetables. Right now in central Florida pickings are slim. Our vegetables come from California and Peru. This pains me.

There is nothing in our garden right now except for basil. The tomato horn worms decimated the peppers and the egg plants that were holdovers from spring. I sprayed them with thuricide. After the armadillo wars in the spring, (they won!) Andy built a raised salad bed that has now been planted with many lettuce varieties, spinach, chard, and kale. He planted a Japanese tomato ring. Soon, the small broccoli plants and collards will be for sale in the farmer's feed store. I will put in several rows of beans, hoping that the armadillos will not uproot them. Vegetables here are still all potential.

I am Lucy with the football. Always hoping for the best, I plant many things, imagining as I drop in the seeds, a great meal from all my fantasies. I have learned through hard experience that those wonderful heirloom tomatoes will not flourish in our short day and extremely hot climate. I have learned that English peas will not produce much, and I have learned that gardening in this semi-tropical climate is a wonderful challenge. I keep trying new things.

My sister-in-law, Nancy tells me that in her area of north Connecticut, the farm stands are overflowing with corn, tomatoes, and everything one could imagine vegetable-wise. Sigh..

So here we plant the fall garden, knowing full well that terrible storms or hurricanes not yet named could ruin everything. And I will always replant, and I will always be rewarded, maybe with something unexpected like a bumper crop of cucumbers or peppers, luffa gourds or carrots.

Our time of triumph is around Thanksgiving when the rest of the country is hunkering down to the beginning of sere winter. We have a bountiful harvest: huge turnips, amazing salad, tomatoes (not heirlooms) to knock your socks off, and the prospect of many lettuces to come.

The photo above is a very large painting I made for Gina's kitchen. She loves vegetables as much as I do. But I grow them and she cooks them!