Quilts and craziness

I am still despondent about the state of the world and the state of the union. Go have your tea parties, pack guns and dismiss everything that you fear and do not understand. Shoot yourself in the foot. Climate change will undo you but you will drive your huge SUVs into the polluted sunset. I devoutly hope I will be dead by then.

So, here is a photo of the beginning of a quilt for my dear friend Julie who is struggling with a rare blood disease. Making this is a positive thing for me. While I sew I think of this wonderful and intelligent woman who has shared such wisdom with me.

In this season of my despondency the best things are working in the vegetable garden, weeding out the dead stuff from the prolonged freeze and renewing the beds, planting new collards and seeding the lettuce beds. I have small seedling containers, now full of shoots.

This is a renewal of life going on and I rejoice in this.

Where are you young people who should be revolutionaries?? Why are you not out there in the front telling the nation what you think can be done?? Are you only hunkered down with your Facebook and Twitter and buying things online and you tube on inconsequential matters? It makes me sad.

Saving the Turtles

Here is a green turtle on a quilt I made a few years ago for these amazing people, the Meylans, the only famous herpetologists I know. (Actually, I don't know any other herpetologists.) And here is a portrait of the heroes, Peter, Anne and Stephan.

In this beginning of the new year we had such a dreadful freeze that decimated crops and gardens in Florida we could hardly keep abreast of the magnitude of the stress in all our wildlife. When Anne and Peter and their sons came for a visit today they were full of the heroic stories about how the sea turtles of Florida were saved after the freeze.

Some four to five thousand sea turtles, mostly green turtles, but some loggerheads, were in terrible distress from the cold. Many were dying and the living ones were cold stunned and lying listless in the sea grass mats near shore and in the estuaries.

Peter Meylan, a professor at Eckerd College, enlisted the help of students in his reptile class. They went north to the Panama City area, where with the help of government and environmental groups and volunteers who scoured the lagoons and weed mats, they rescued many turtles, bringing them to the Gulfworld Aquarium in Panama City to warm up before release.

Meanwhile Anne Meylan from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation, and her son Stephan (on winter break from college) needed to take 92 cold stunned turtles from Pinellas to Ocala and the Wakala fish hatchery where they had the tanks to revive the turtles. On their wild ride to Ocala with the turtles they described having those huge hundred pound turtles barging around the floor of the van, getting under their feet, lunging everywhere.

After their turtle drop off near Ocala, they went to Merrit Island where there were hundreds of sea turtles, also cold stunned. Here, NASA let the sea turtle rescue operation use the NASA orbitor warehouse where there was a warmer. Seaworld, Disney, and others helped with their resources. There were lots of veterinarians who helped in the tagging and getting blood samples for genetic testing. Many of the turtles had fibropapiloma tumors, a contagious condition, and these turtles had to be separated from the healthy ones. This was the first time Stephan had had to do really fast work to pit tag these huge sea turtles. (This is the same thing we do to microchip our dog and cat pets.) The rescue operation painted numbers on each turtle after tagging. This took days and cold nights warmed by adrenalin, no doubt.

After warming and the data gathering, the turtles were released into the sea again. The dead ones had to be taken to the dump. Anne spoke of the steady volunteers who helped with this awful chore.

I have probably made mistakes in the telling of this. But what I know is that many many folks here in Florida stepped up to save a huge population of sea turtles. Eighty-five percent of them were saved!)

The Meylans are exhausted. We fed them a supper of rice and beans and listened to their stories.

The best stuff one ever does in life is responding to crisis. We Americans are so good at this. There are legions of ordinary folks who trundle off to New Orleans to rebuild houses, or cook for the homeless, or save manatees, or go to third world nations to repair cleft palates or fistulas. We take simple stoves and water purification and bed nets to places in need of these things. We believe that thing by thing, one by one, we can make a difference. And we do.

But we must also think over the long haul. We cannot just respond to a crisis, and this is certainly good. For Haiti we need to keep on giving in a responsible way after the water and food crisis abates.

We are global, we are our neighbors.

January Blues

Collards covered with frost for the tenth day! How discouraging to all of us who are trying to grow anything. The Glavitches who farm vegetables and sell them in a farm stand told us that the temperature in their strawberry fields was 13 degrees this morning! But still, they had the cherry tomatoes I needed for an old fashioned egg strata I will take to the garden club tomorrow.

We went over to Warren's orange grove to pick fruit to squeeze. At mid afternoon there were still columns of ice around the young trees from the all night watering he's had to do to preserve his grove during this prolonged freeze. But we were all happy to be out with Warren and his big gentle dog and the long handled pickers, getting a little warmth from the late sun. We cut into a few oranges to see if they were damaged beyond salvation. They seemed fine to me, and I know that my students tomorrow will enjoy making juice from them that they'll drink with the bread and butter they will be making.

These doings are small and beautiful gems of hope and pleasure in what I increasingly see as a depressing world. I have begun to think we have reached the tipping point (to what?). The age of civility has definitely passed. I used to love the so-called American spirit of independence, generosity and competence. Now, I don't know where it's gone.. Americans get their information from quick twitters, rumors, and charlatans, aka talk show hosts, pundits and bloggers.

We have "tea party" politicians who oppose abortion in a knee jerk way, and yet can't do the hard work to think through and act to protect the kids we already have. (More than seventy kids in Florida died or were killed last year through neglect or abuse!)

Seems everything is about politics and getting elected next time. I am not sure that our politicians are listening to what people really want. (We all want lower cost and predictable health care! Anyone would love a public option or single payer health care where you could just go and get the health care you need!) Problem is we want everything for free, no new taxes.

The world is just going too fast. How can we think about health care, the wars, climate change and the economy all at once? We don't need this constant yammer about who said what and did what and slept with whom and took what performance enhancing drugs. We need to let our current administration lead us and focus on what NEEDS TO BE DONE to keep our country on track without constantly fending off the gnats.

I did not vote for Bush, but I knew that when he was elected (sort of), he was our president and that the office of President must be respected. I am an American. It seems that so many in Congress are just trying to undermine our magnificent Constitution. We are all a People and this partisanship has elevated to very dangerous levels. Republicans and Democrats- come on! We are all Americans, not out to shoot each other, but to hunker down and work on some hard problems we all have whatever political stripe.

I am discouraged because I now think that in almost all cases our politicians can be bought for the right price. They are beholden to the big pharmaceutical and insurance companies, big oil, local companies. There is a scandal every day. (Did we forget how to be honest? Was integrity forgotten in the wild days of the last decade?)

My husband often reminds me that history replays itself. FDR was hated by many but he navigated the country through a depression that lasted far longer than this current recession will. Lyndon Johnson put in place many social reforms that we now take for granted. I was appalled that my own child had no idea who Lyndon Johnson was and what a long lasting stamp he put on our social policies. What happened to social studies education? Belatedly, she got this information by visiting the LBJ library in Austin.

Is all knowledge of history a thing of the past, so to speak? Do we have to reinvent the wheel over and over again? Has our instant world of the internet and trivial knowledge supplanted everything? Can we have it both ways? Our small grandson has technological know- how beyond mine, but still, we ride around and he asks me the questions of the ages: "Who is god?" and "Do starfish have eyes?" and "When will my mom be back?"

I am not at all sure that I would want to have kids if I were now of childbearing age. I can't see clearly that our values will prevail. I love each day living in this wonderful place, probably an anachronism.

Winter Garden

For the last few days we have awoken to the sight of frost on the fields and that dreaded acrid odor of frozen vegetation. I drive the mile up our driveway to get the newspapers, glad of those ridiculous heated seats. I can see that the day will be brilliant blue but I know that it will be cold all day and we'll be wearing those oddly assorted layers of all the winter gear we Floridians can find. Last week I was wearing shorts and this development makes me crabby.

After breakfast I make the rounds to mourn the demise of the Mexican petunias, the beach sunflowers I have enjoyed all summer and the succulants around the water garden. The pentas are limp and blackened, the ferns possibly hanging on until they are killed by another couple of frosts forecast for the rest of the week. The plumbago is still bravely blooming as are the knock out roses. We covered the newly planted citrus trees and the big begonia. I had taken all the orchids into the house. But there are so many plants and not enough sheets and clothespins to save all the plants.

The vegetable garden has been hanging on with the collards, broccoli, spinach and peas. The carrots are safely in the ground and the cabbage is clearly loving this cold weather. It would be nice if the weeds were to go! All those incredible butterfly attracting flowers are dead, but no doubt they will come back in the spring. I wonder where the butterflies go?

The electric company trimmed back trees last week and left us a huge amount of newly shredded mulch. When it warms up I will down load many wheelbarrows full of it and get the place ready for the spring garden. I have ordered the seeds and have the starter pots ready to place near a warm window. As usual, when all is potential, I have grand fantasies that this year I will have tomatoes in such abundance we will make salsa and juice and ketchup and sauce with enough left over to give away to all our friends. There will be no horn worms, no stink bugs, no blossom end rot. The eggplants will behave and produce only a moderate harvest, not twenty fruits each day. The lettuces will not bolt overnight. The armadillos will not root up the beans.

As my friend Virginia said, "Vegetable gardening is a slow learning curve." After many years you really do get to know what actually grows well in your site. You know that those weird cultivars that look so magnificent in the seed catalog and make you drool just thinking of eating them are probably not going to do well. There is a reason that Farmers Feed store sells pacman broccoli seedlings, never that "new" golden broccoli you see in the seed catalog. So mostly I stick with what is locally available, tried and true. I yearn for the interesting mesclun lettuces and have been pretty successful with growing them in raised salad tables. I keep trying the heirloom tomatoes but I really know that the local Homestead and Big Boy and Early Girl are the ones that can really produce (barring the bugs).

So, even as the frost relentlessly appears each morning, I await my package of seeds and the endless possibilities in those packets. I believe the frost killed plants will rise again in the warmth of spring days. I am not too daunted as I crunch across the frozen fields.

Holidays!

In no particular order here are some images from our holidays. First, the cats, Lewis and Clark, who are the owners of our good friends, Richard and Lucy. We drove up to North Carolina, a four day trip to celebrate the New Year and our friendship. After two weeks of non-stop parties (ours), we looked forward to the road trip in winter. The landscape changed from Florida green to the colorful and sere winter trees along the way. Our dog, Lola, was thrilled to be in a new motel along the way in Athens, Georgia. As we approached our friends' home on a mountain top, we saw piles of old tired snow from a previous storm but the twisty gravel road was clear. And then, there was the glorious view of layers and layers of smokey mountains and wet black skeletons of deciduous trees. I didn't know how much I have missed this image.

Our Christmas was quite traditional, though secular. We loved having so many family members and friends around. Quincy, our youngest grandchild was here on Christmas Eve, helped lay out the stockings (knitted by Lucy)by the fireplace, and put out a carrot for Rudolph. In the morning, he awoke to the stuffed stockings and a shiny new bike. What he loved best was the slinky he found in his stocking, and the tiny stuffed frog. Kids! The hall was clogged with the huge motorized crane from his uncle and aunt and he quickly figured out how to hoist that tiny stuffed frog into the nether.

The next day we had the traditional immense red snapper with green rice to be eaten by twenty friends and family. Norman and Virginia provided the fish, the Meylans brought a wonderful ham, Andy and I cooked collards, Elizabeth made the potatoes, I made strawberry shortcake and the Betzers brought many chocolate items. (A food group!) Everyone helped, the green salad was from our garden. We had NINE dogs in attendance! A record. They were all well behaved.

Before the dinner we all (dogs included) go out for a walk through the fields and woods. We laugh and talk and touch each other and I am thinking how blessed I am to be here right now. Here are old friends and some new ones, all ages, life goes on, the natural world around me is amazing. Quincy finds a small skull and Peter Meylan and Susie Betzer explain. He is clearly enthralled and wants me to keep this skull in my pocket. I hold out my hand and it is immediately filled with his small warm one. I look ahead and see the rest of the group and the long rays of the afternoon strike the golden head of Stephan,Peter's oldest son, just on the brink of adulthood. In this decade I have watched this boy grow up, and I rejoice. I see the daughters of us all there. How we love our children!

The next day after most of the crowd left Andy and I drove up to North Carolina. This last photo is of Lola, our dog, who has never before experienced snow. We made her wear this "dress" and she hated it and was clearly embarrassed to be seen in it. Lola is used to being the alpha dog in any situation but the twenty pound cats bested her!

This is a new year and a new decade, and so many of us hope for a better time. Many of my friends, this last year, have struggled with life threatening health issues. I am thinking of two Julies I love who are recovering. I am thinking of Juliet, my old childhood best friend, who's husband is facing cancer surgery tomorrow. I am thinking of young friends who have untimely lost their mothers. I am thinking of all the friends and family who have lost jobs.

And I am thinking of our president who has such a heavy load to bear. We need to be civil and supportive of each other, we Americans. We are it, that's all we have. Give thanks and be generous, that's what we can do.

Peace and happiness in the new year.