Organizing a community

Today, making the ten minute trip north from our place to the monthly Community Task Force meeting in Lacoochee, I loved the slightly rolling land, now brown and sere from recent freezes with an occasional blooming fruit tree here and there.
Turning off the main road, I can imagine that I have somehow found myself in the outskirts of Belize City, that place even the guide books tell you to avoid. Crossing the railroad tracks, the town looks particularly grim. It is just beginning to rain and everything I pass seems dispirited. There are clumps of trash plastered along the road, a few young men with extremely low riding pants lounging under the trees, a few rangy dogs, and some left over evidence of meager life lived here.
I turn in to the school compound, a cheerful beacon, and go into the office to get my visitor badge and have some cheerful chat with Annette who runs the front desk.
I have come to love these meetings. For so many years of my efficient life I have run meetings, and all issues are quickly addressed, no running over the margins.
This is a whole different deal. We begin by serving ourselves from a big pot of soup. (If you're vegetarian, ladle it off the top and if you want the chicken, dig to the bottom.) Everyone takes a place at the tables in the multipurpose room: the officer friendly from the Sheriff's department who runs the Boy Scouts, the earnest man who runs the Boys and Girls Club, the enthusiastic woman from United Way, whose mission is to get funds for Lacoochee, the retirees who run a food pantry from a local generic church. I see that the long-winded guy who runs the neighborhood watch program is absent today. The school/community liason person is there. I love Andrea, so devoted to the cause.
But the big star is Ms. Marler, the principal of the school. Karen Marler is a native of Lacoochee and came back to run this struggling school. Her heart and expertise is in community organizing. "Everything is about the kids," she always says. I used to think, when I was first a volunteer in this school, that something was lacking in the leadership of this school. But I didn't understand where she was coming from.
This day, she is full of her experience in taking a busload of local officials and executives who may be able to invest in this community on a tour of the town. She is lovely in a Dolly Parton sort of way and she has that chewy Florida accent. Talk about a steel magnolia! She seems to have no limit to the time she spends with our group, but she gets everything done, and everyone at the meeting leaves inspired. We have decided to do a community garden, we know where to get grants for the cheerleader costumes, and benches for the football players. Marler listens!
I am humbled by it all. When I think of all the small groups like this who are meeting around our country and who are doing just these things, I am amazed and heartened.
The poster boy in the picture is one of many I have known here at Lacoochee. Most of the kids are Hispanic. He, and all the rest deserve the best!
One of the best things about this day was meeting a young teacher (third grade), Ben Aguilar, tall and handsome and brown like my nephews. He was the brightest and best in Lacoochee when he was a kid. He went on to college and felt called to return and teach there. He runs an after school program in drama for parents and kids. I signed up as a volunteer! How could I not? Stay tuned.

Organizing a community

Big Freeze

The fields are covered with frost. For three nights there has been a hard freeze warning. In all my forty years here there has never been such a happening. All the orchids are dead, the palms have been hard hit, the ferns are toast. I can see that we have lost some citrus trees. I did not plant anything in the vegetable garden that couldn't tolerate frost, and I have dutifully covered the salad beds.
But we smell that acrid smell of bursting cellulose. Maybe this is an opportnity!
My brother and his wife are visiting us from California. They wanted warm and tropical weather, and at the last minute they included sweaters. Little did they know! We have unearthed all the shirts and jackets we have.
Undaunted, we went on a field trip to north Florida, leaving the plants covered and the dog warm with the house sitter. Our destination was Wakulla Springs Lodge where we would spend the night and welcome friends from Tallahassee for dinner.
Wakulla is a fascinating place, a state park. Our family has been there many times, only in the warm weather. We arrived in time to take the famous boat tour up the St. Marks River. It was not much over 40 degrees but the boat went slowly so we were not buffeted by wind. This boat trip is just as interesting as a trip on the Amazon; there is so much natural flora and fauna to see, and in such magnificent numbers. Alligators, deer, hundreds of birds, fish, turtles, wonderful aquatic plants, ancient cypress trees. We loved seeing the anhingas spreading their wings, an eagle soaring overhead, ibis looking for food, coots and moorhens bobbing about on the clear water. We loved seeing many manatees enjoying the warm spring water. Mothers and young came up with their funny snouts next to the boat.
The lodge itself was an adventure. We had engaged the two 'best rooms' that overlooked the spring. The building itself is lovely, the Ball Estate originally. It is now part of the State Park system. As I say, it was an adventure. In the vast lobby there is an ancient alligator in a case, "Old Joe", well varnished, maybe 20 ft. long, maybe fifty years old. Then there is the huge fireplace burning bright and hot. There are a few communities of sofas, some strange aggregations of high backed chairs, a few tables where checkers can be played, a large t.v not playing to anything, and some stacks of tables. The floor is wonderful and cold marble tile with not a suggestion of a softening area rug. When you look up the ceiling is beautiful carved wood, dark and colorful. This is not an intimate place, but it has possibilities.
Our rooms were gigantic, way larger than in any motel or hotel.( and a lot cheaper) My brother read the guest log in his room and found a recent entry that said, "Warning! Warning! There is a mouse in the bathroom! My wife has never packed so fast! This was at least a mouse, or maybe a squirrel with a bald tail!" We all laughed but my sister-in-law said the next morning that she'd heard some scrabbling in the bathroom..
The dinner provided by the lodge was wonderfully awful. We had known not to expect anything gourmet, maybe true southern (and all white) at best. But the main thing was the company which was stellar. Richard, at the far end of the table, and I, had ordered the pecan crusted grouper. Both of us love fish. Heavy brown logs arrived before us, nothing anyone could imagine other than the bubbly buttery nutty sauteed grouper we were expecting. Dismayed at finding that our entrees looked more like a second rate Spanish moss fabric art form than actual food, we soldiered on, and pushed it from side to side on our plates. The others were struggling with strange chicken parts, small game birds, and (Yikes!) liver. My brother had to remove the hard casings from his southern fried chicken and they lay on the edge of his plate, thick exoskeletons.
This morning we awakened to the fact that the power was off. Our car was covered with frost and ice. We left, thinking we'd get breakfast along the way, and could decently leave the lodge and the breakfast of leaden biscuits with gray gravy.
I love these road trip adventures. Not your usual motel. But I do think that in this new era of CHANGE, we might be able to make this special place, Wakulla Springs Lodge, a state park, into a really spectacular destination with at least acceptable food and decent accommodations (no mice).

The Humility of Gardening

There was a light frost on the fields this morning. If you squint a bit, you can almost believe it's snow. By nine a.m. it was all gone. The night before, expecting cold weather, I had placed sheets over the tenderest of the vegetables, and now I needed to remove them so the feeble rays of sun could give them a boost for the next two days of predicted really cold weather. I will put them back on.
I have been so proud of this winter garden, mostly all brassicas- collards, broccoli, and the mustard greens and beets, and two lovely raised salad tables, now bursting with many kinds of lettuces, chard and mizuma. I have put in a row of snow peas because I know they can take the cold better than any plant. The deep hay mulch keeps the weeds at bay, or at least hidden. This hay roll was a gift from my wonderful neighbor, Warren, and hardly a day goes by when I don't put another load on the garden. Tonight I have covered the hardiest vegetables with a thick layer of hay. I wonder if it will keep those babies safe. I have spread a lot of bed sheets over the salad tables and the broccoli plants now covered with florets.
The orchids live next to the pool and I hope they will not freeze. I have covered them with sheets, but they are pretty hardy plants.
I know that when I go out tomorrow morning I will smell that acrid odor of frozen plant cells now bursting. I know that the ferns will have that shiny look of death by cold. The bird bath will be frozen stiff, the milkweed flowers limp. The pastures will be sere and brown and the cows will need more feed. The bird feeders will need filling. The cardinals will relentlessly remind me.
It has been a wonderfully warm winter, after an usual blast of frost in November. The plants had no clue about what to do. Even with the short days of winter, they leapt up in the warm sun. We've been eating our own salad every day and have those collards in every way we can imagine. Broccoli is on the menu several days a week. The deer and armadillos have left the garden alone, the dogs bark off the rabbits, the bugs are waiting for warmer weather, and we have been eating well. My spring seeds have come in the mail and the tomatoes and peppers are sprouting in their plastic pots that live for now indoors on the bench in the inglenook.
But! Now we face some extreme cold weather for the next few nights. Those crazy colored bedsheets over everything will not be enough. I know this. My husband reminded me today that probably we will lose the garden but life will go on.
I have the new seeds ready to plant and those sprouts coming along. I love this aspect of living dangerously embedded in the natural world. It keeps me humble. I cannot count on the weather in winter. (In summer I can always count on the weather being totally hot and humid and full of bugs and mildews and blossom end rot, not to mention malignant flinders.)
The garden keeps my balance. This is a good thing because my head was in danger of being swollen too big this week. My daughter hosted a book signing party for me and my new book, "A Good Day for Uncle Elmo: Stories from a Schoolteacher's Journal". It was a very fun party and so affirming of the work I loved. Got back home, tended the garden, and replied to requests for a couple more book signing events. I'll do them because all the proceeds go to the school I wrote about.
Now, my small grandson is about to arrive to spend four days with his grandparents. I am thinking about French toast and fresh squeezed orange juice for breakfast and then, perhaps a trip to the library and the train museum and maybe make cookies. Let's not forget the hot chocolate on a frosty morning. Candyland is the game of the day and I have rented "The March of the Penguins" we can watch together.
Vegetables and kids growing. My head is getting back to the right size but my heart grows with the bounty of life.

Clothesline

Last year I decided that we should install a clothesline in our yard. I wanted to save electricity and reduce our energy footprint. In Europe, as you can see here in Italy, everyone hangs out their clothes, no matter how small the space is.
But we have loads of space and have always thought we had loads of energy. The clothesline was installed, one of those windmill things, next to the vegetable garden and a short schlep from the washer.
I thought I would hate having to hang out the laundry every day, another chore. But it didn't turn out that way. We start the laundry washing before breakfast, and by the time we are finished eating and cleaning up the kitchen, the laundry is ready to be hung out. This is my best chore: we both love it! We get out there in the first sunny and warm moments of the day. The sand hill cranes are just zooming in with their wild cries and the vegetable garden is so green and verdant and all of life is full of possibilities.
The best thing for me is the artistic arrangement of the clothes to be placed on the line. I love it when we have colorful sheets and towels, maybe a tablecloth or two in brilliant colors. I even love those blue jeans that will flap in the breeze, my black bra, Andy's red underwear and the socks neatly pinned together in pairs. We have our system- socks together, the heavy things towards the sun, the colorful things on the outside to be seen as an artistic gem.
In a few hours, just before lunch, I'll take everything down, folding them from the line into neat stacks, everything smelling sweet from the sun and breeze.
Our parents always dried clothes outdoors. Probably only our mothers did this.

Growing things

Walking out in the woods today I saw so may of these reindeer moss areas. These small light mosses lie on the forest floor to delight the eye. When the day is moist they are soft, but when it is dry they are brittle and you might think they would blow away.
I often take my mini walks to areas close to our house and I am coming to know the territory. I know where the reindeer moss grows, where the cardinals nest, where the tortoises and black racers have buried their eggs, where the turkeys have sex in the morning, and where the cranes dance their loud trumpeting love calls.
But nothing here engages me more than the daily tending to the gardens. Even in winter with the constant possibility of frost, we have an amazing vegetable garden. Daily, I announce to Andy, the cook, that we have collards, broccoli, lettuce and green onions. That's it for now. And that's what we eat every night. Up north they don't even have that!
The winter garden is neat and productive, everything carefully mulched with hay. I have ordered the spring seeds and look forward to those warm weather vegetables, the tomatoes and peppers and beans, squash and eggplants. But for now, I love those verdant greens.
For the last ten days we have been dog sitting my daughter's two dogs. One is a very large and beautiful black and white pointer mix, and the other is a four pound teacup poodle. Our own dog is a small wiener dog. The visiting dogs are totally neurotic and want to follow us everywhere and the tiny poodle has no sense of being house trained and is so bony and icky one wouldn't love to touch her. And she has an incredibly shrill and sharp voice! The visiting dogs are 'door bounders' and bark at everything. We are exhausted with all this. I say to them, "Get a life!" But their life is us. I cannot wait for them to be reclaimed by my daughter. Still, I do love animals, and I like to take the big dog out with me on my forays into the woods and fields. But I cannot wait to be just us, the family of two with one small dog who doesn't bark much (except at armadillos) and has a life that doesn't include following us everywhere.
Dogs or no, this is an incredible place! This evening I saw four deer under the feeder, the sand hill crane couple dancing, a turkey gobbler showing his stuff, gobbling (and still jumping on the female), and so many cardinals at the porch feeder, I can't count them. Venus is the brightest light in the sky and Orion shines bright. This feels perfect.