Thankful

These orchids, given to me by my best friend are in profuse bloom these last days of autumn. Every day I look at them and I am thankful for the friendship they signify and for the beauty of them in my life.

Since I was of the age to be at all sensible I have always loved Thanksgiving above all holidays. Even now, no one has figured out how to make this holiday extremely commercial. After all this time, Thanksgiving is still about family and giving. I read about how dysfunctional families snipe at each other, hunker down and watch football, remark on who eats or doesn't eat. Here, no one ever turns on the t.v. at Thanksgiving, and we are all foodies. After dinner we all go out and look at alligators and frogs.

I have hardly ever had a bad time at Thanksgiving. There was one I remember when my sister was born and my dad cooked a duck that was slightly raw! And then there was the Thanksgiving when we lived in Paris, specially ordered a turkey and when we picked it up it had feathers, legs, feet and a beak! Our kitchen was a tiny place and I remember how we addressed this situation, like surgeons, so serious! The turkey was good as I remember. Then there was the Thanksgiving here at the ranch when our soon-to-be ex daughter in law made it so uncomfortable that we all fanned out over the pastures and wept.

But mostly, Thanksgivings in our family are wonderful and affirming. For so many years we did not have any kin to come so we made a feast with friends. Now, we have a number of family members who live in the vicinity: a sister and her husband, a daughter and her son, a nephew and his wife. And the old friends who have really been our family all these years. And new friends.

We will all gather here for the day. Some will spend the night. Many will bring dishes to share and the kitchen will be hopping! We'll move the dining table from the kitchen to the hall and install a couple of extra tables, find the high chairs for the twins, gather chairs from all over the house, spread out mismatched tablecloths and table settings. It won't look like a state dinner at the White House, but it will be fine! The turkey and the salmon will be presented. Everyone will love the gravy and the mashed potatoes and the many other dishes, many from the garden. They'll love the pies and cake. The kids will jump around and behave like all kids do.

Most of all, we'll be thankful to be here in all skin hues together in this ragged country with a pragmatic president who is basically a good person. I give thanks for all of this.

On being a Senior Citrizen, Some Thoughts..

It has been spectacular weather these last few days- what we come to Florida for. The nights are so cool we put on extra covers and welcome the dog who runs hot at our feet in bed. The early mornings are foggy and the blackbirds scream and chuckle as they pass by. The cool weather vegetables such as peas and lettuces are thriving. The garden is still full of butterflies.

We have our wonderful routine of breakfast and then reading the papers. Then I have many plans for the day: weeding the gardens, clipping, fertilizing, and then working in my studio on whatever quilt or painting or photographs or writing project I have going. Some days I have my volunteer work in our local school and I love this! My new knowledge of Spanish has helped me enormously. I am energized to be of help. There is never enough time to do all I want to do.

Yet, to be a senior citizen, someone who has been a long time worker (for a wage!), has its complexities. There are many aspects of being retired that we all love. You surely cannot miss those staff meetings or those stomach turning events when you have to fire someone or you know you have screwed up or you have to do way too much in a day, and we wonder what we'll do.

So, here we are, retired, full of experience and some wisdom and on Medicare and Social Security. What will we do? For the first couple of years we flop around, thankful not to be on a work and commute schedule, and we cast around for what will make us feel purposeful. We try various volunteer activities and some of them stick. You cannot make a life out of baby sitting the grand kids.

I think women have a better grip on this period of life. Because we are in this generation we have known what it is to have been in the first cohort of women who worked and also had to do the work of being the wife and mother (as our mothers did). And so we have a great deficit of time for ourselves. While we were raising the kids and going to work we dreamed of having time for ourselves. And now we do - and we are going for it!

Our husbands who made the lion's share of the household economy, and worked so hard for their families got left out of even thinking about what else beyond the work they were doing they could do in the future. Shuffleboard isn't enough.

I know so many women my age whose husbands are now so bereft in retirement. I see these men following along behind their wives in the grocery store. Women tell me that their husbands don't do anything, just sit there and read magazines or watch t.v. or play golf. Are they waiting to be invited to the great platter of life?

I think that the next generation prior to the baby boomers will be better prepared for the long and glorious generative years than we are. They will have the experience of being unemployed, scratching for their roles in the family. I only hope they will have the wonderful benefits we do (Thanks to the government !).

Almost Thanksgiving

When I go out to visit the vegetable garden I am stunned by the number and variety of butterflies still flitting around. Last spring I planted a small space for zinnias (I love these bright easy tacky flowers and so do the butterflies). In the heat of summer all those zinnias died back but hundreds of volunteers sprang up from the spent seed heads this fall. Of course I could not bear to turn them under so they are in profusion with the milkweed and red sage among the collards and broccoli and collards. I beat them back from the carrots and peas. The lettuce is doing well, some of it has bolted in the heat but each day I plant more seeds. I think we are set for salad through the winter, if it doesn't freeze hard.

What I love about gardening is that it is never the same from year to year. You never know about the weather! The only things I plant regularly are tomatoes in spring, collards, beans, onions, carrots and broccoli, and of course, many types of lettuces. Last garden we had beets. This fall we have kohlrabi and broccoli raab and, hopefully, peas. I love potatoes - such an adventure to dig them out, feeling through the soil to find those tender and tasty globes. I plant these in February.

In some gardening rotations I vow to have a really neat garden- no weeds in the paths, all the beds well mulched with compost - and NO zinnias! But in this fall garden the place is ample with flowers along side the vegetables, even morning glory volunteers triumphantly climbing the fence.

Quincy, my grandson, is here for a weekend. Maybe I can get him interested in weeding. Whatever we do, it will be outside in this glorious weather. Perhaps we'll take some of the water weeds out of the fish pond. We'll collect pine cones and look at frogs, ride our bikes down the road. And we'll go out adventuring after dark to look for alligators and spiders. He loves to wear his head lamp, so bold, but I feel his warm hand in mine and I think about that delicious time after his bath when we cuddle down to read a story. I tell him that tomorrow's another day, Grandpa's going to make pancakes and will need help squeezing the oranges for our juice. He'll appear early all dressed and ready for the day.

So many hard things are happening right now about being... Living on a farm and having a five year old you love beyond the beyond come to visit puts me in the here and now, and it isn't bad.

New Boy!

Here is Seattle Brooks Bazely, a few minutes old, my newest family member, my great nephew. He's an Australian citizen, how amazing! He's a poster boy for government health care. Look at those beady watchful eyes. He's thinking about what the USA, his other country, will decide about the many challenges it faces.

His mother, Shady, spent a year living with us when she was eleven. Lots about that year were hard for us all but we put down the basics for a lifetime of caring for each other. I remember that when she went home to visit her Western family, I wept as I put her on the plane. She had become such a part of our lives I could barely part with her even for ten days. When I brushed her hair, I marveled at the roundness of the back of her head, so different from my own children's. I cooked dinner to the sounds of her practicing piano.

She ultimately married an Australian, a lovely man, and she became a professor of English in a university in Australia. She's written a book, become a fine musician and made Australia her home. From time to time she visits the United States and her western family in Seattle. She's also come here to Florida with her husband. We have visited them in Australia and they certainly showed us a grand time.

Two years ago for Thanksgiving we met Shady and Scotty in Wellington, New Zealand, where we were visiting New Zealand friends. How fun that was shopping for a traditional U.S. Thanksgiving in the Wellington markets. Some stuff was hard to find (Cranberry sauce?!) Many of us gathered in a strange ultra modern time-share overlooking the harbor. We had traveled to New Zealand with my brother and his wife, making our way from the north island all the way to the end of the south island. Wellington in the middle, and Thanksgiving for the expats was a treat. I was so excited to see our old friends from the U.S. and the big bonus of seeing Shady and Scotty.

We keep in touch, mostly by e-mail. And now Shady and Scotty have baby Seattle they are in love with! Shady was in the hospital for three nights and four days. They keep all new mothers this long. The labor was long and hard, but no knock out drugs, no Cesarean. In Australia and New Zealand and in most European countries, they keep new mothers in hospital until the milk comes in and the new moms get the support of lactation specialists. (Here in the USA you are lucky to be in the hospital after a normal birth for about twelve hours. Insurance.)

When I spoke with Shady today, five days after Seattle's birth, her midwife was just coming to check on the breastfeeding and the well being of baby Seattle. In the background I could hear those dear little chirps and sucking sounds. Shady will be on maternity leave for a YEAR! Scotty will have three months of paternity leave from his job.

Our young friends in New Zealand who have two small children are equally blessed by their health care system. One of their boys seemed to have some language delay. On their national health service, no problem, a speech therapist came to their house for several years. There was lots of support, and now this little boy is just fine, speaks as well as any young New Zealand citizen.

I can't help thinking that we in the United States are so sorely lacking in the care of our children. What is the matter with us that we do not take care of our kids?? Some on the extreme right holler about abortions, but I wonder what they are thinking about the kids that are actually here? We put children at the bottom of all priorities. How sad. How venal we are!

Today I went to speak to a group of forty Hispanic parents in our local school about nutrition. These low paid and unemployed folks care just as much as anyone about their kids, but they get no help. (I am imagining a scenario where a speech therapist shows up at one of the public housing units.) Couldn't happen here. This is the US of America where we love our scoundrels in the insurance and finance realms. And we do not really care about our children (our legacy!).

Sometimes, I believe that people are acting and reacting because of a t.v. mentality: everything's fake and plastic and so many can't think or question on their own and so take their opinions from talk shows that confirm their fears. Internet screeds feed their prejudices.

Meanwhile, I'm out to save the world, at least my little corner of it, by volunteering, giving and engaging. And, mostly, I try to remain humble and open to new ideas.

Seattle, welcome to a most difficult world. Your parents are so brave and optimistic! Perhaps you can make a difference. I am counting on you!

(0 unread) Yahoo! Mail, ranchmolly

(0 unread) Yahoo! Mail, ranchmolly

Health Care

We are down to the wire on health care reform. It has been a dizzying time. There have been so many issues, most of them so hard to understand! Most of us look at this issue through our personal prisms. If you are young and 'invincible' and only watch Fox News or listen to the hard right radio shows, your knee jerk reaction is that all this smacks of the dreaded word, which you actually never looked up: "socialism", let alone thought about.

Or maybe you are young and invincible and have no health insurance, and still don't think hard about any issues not pertaining to you so you just think "Whatever.. Doesn't apply to me." You need to get on board.

In a Kristoff column in the paper today I noted some statistics. The United States is lagging far behind every developed country in every area of health. We are so behind many other countries in the benchmarks of infant mortality, healthy births, etc. We lag in these milestones until (UNTIL!) we look at our elderly population - the folks over 65, and then the United States comes out on top. Could this be because of Medicare, the government program that ensures that every single person over the age of 65 has access to decent health care??

This week I have had some health issues, nothing major, and I will tell you that I have had personal experience of splendid care on the Medicare dime. I go to a local clinic to a family practice group and I have rarely ever seen a child there. I believe this is because the families in this area do not have insurance. In emergencies they go to the ER at the local hospital.

But we oldsters confidently step up to our local doctors and clinics, pay a nominal co-pay, and in many instances pay nothing. And so we avert health disasters, and if they strike, we can deal thanks to Medicare.

Why are we talking about sending Granny off on an ice floe?? Granny is just fine on Medicare (and she knows that Hospice is always there just in case). What we really need to think about are the kids who rarely get to their checkups, never see a dentist. Their parents need to have checkups as well, need to have dentistry, need to have the option of taking their kids to a family doctor (such as I have!) who knows them and is following their health history. What we need is Medicare for everyone.

The so called government option is great! Just ask anyone sixty-five or over. That's all I'm saying.

Flubber! At Lacoochee on kids' time.

These kids are enjoying an afternoon last week of making and playing with Flubber. We made it from Borax and white glue and food color. This polymer has so many amazing properties that intrigue kids. They are playing with this amazing stuff, figuring out how it operates. We talked a bit about what's in the ingredients and why it might behave the way it does and I asked them to experiment at home with it, i.e. freeze it, put it in the microwave, let it sit, etc.

This week when I appeared some of the kids wanted to tell me about their experiment I had encouraged them to do at home. The flubber they froze became hard and when thawed was as usual. The Flubber they cooked in the microwave bubbled and never recovered its original property.

There is never enough time. I have an hour and a half to address these interesting observations. We could spend an entire week, all hours on this, and the kids would have an insight about the science of life! But, no, their remarkable teacher, Rachel, must hue to the exigencies of 'What one must do as a teacher in these days'.

In today's educational system, there is no paying attention to the 'teachable moment'. This is when a kid comes into class with a praying mantis he/she has captured. In the teachable moment the teacher puts aside the lesson plan for the moment and directs the kids to look carefully at this interesting insect. There are all sorts of ideas that can be pursued. Science? Ecology? General knowledge? So many ways to go! And where kids go shouldn't be always constricted by the schedule.

Each week I do a cooking project with these nine and ten year- olds. They love the chopping and the mixing and everything hands-on. And they especially like eating what they have made. It is worth it to shlep in all the pans and pots and ingredients. There are two volunteer parents who usually show up to help and I adore them!

Aside from this very satisfactory volunteer activity, and others, I am loving this wonderful Florida autumn when you don't die if you work outside. I spend an hour at least in the vegetable garden, a third of which is now given over to the butterflies who flit in the milkweed, red sage and zinnias. We eat every evening from a choice of broccoli, rappini, beans, collards, eggplants and lettuces.

When we visited Colombia I vowed to make in this year a renewed effort to really learn conversational Spanish. On line I found a program (Pimsleur) that would seem to fit. I ordered it for $9.00. And what a deal! I look forward to each day when I can do another unit. Now I am on lesson 7. There are only eight! Today at school I was able to actually speak to the volunteer women who help me in the cooking.

This program just sucks you in, it's so compelling. In a stellar program of marketing, they sent me the next twenty lessons just as I am about to finish the $9 program. They give you 30 days to review it, no money. Hey! I can do these next lessons, a day at a time, send it back for free. I would pay the $275 they want for this. It's worth it. But, if I continue tomorrow, and on, and I will, I'll have fluency in Spanish before my thirty days are up. (But, maybe they are on to me and will send the next bunch of CD's with a sheriff!)

Always interesting to be in my skin.

Grandsons visiting!

Here is a drawing my sixteen year old grandson made in the day and a half he visited us on his long weekend to look at Florida colleges. Diego arrived very late on Friday (we were asleep). He appeared in the morning, many hugs and kisses. We were so glad to see him after three months since the last sighting of him in Puerto Rico. After a decent interval of our questions and his answers about how he was and what he might expect from these few days of looking at colleges here that he might apply to, he drifted off to my studio where he feels comfortable. I knew that my art space would be his for the duration.

He's been here many times, and always spends the most time here where there are so many art materials - papers, inks, paints, cloth, and everything anyone could want. His productions are stellar. This time, he only really had a day to work.

He sits there at the big central table thinking for awhile. Then he starts to assemble his tools and materials. He knows where everything is. All the while I am working on my current quilt project. It is companionable- the elderly grandma and the young one. The large art table spills over with crayons, inks, scissors. Sometimes we talk and sometimes a friendly silence falls when you could hear only the whir of the sewing machine or the scratching of crayons on an interesting surface. We often listen to classical music.

Out of the corner of my eye I am watching how my grandson explores the media he has chosen, always thinking, always thinking, trying out various techniques. Sometimes we talk about what we are doing. Sometimes I direct him to some new art supply I have. Occasionally I ask him about his life and school. We discuss theater techniques and books and plays we have read, his family, his friends, details of life. He's sixteen, he never asks me anything about our lives, but he's so observant about all the tiny changes here since he last visited I can forgive his incuriousness about us. He knows we will always be there. (Hey, you've got wrinkles, are you about to die of something?) Kids cannot think about this, I know.

I think that this wonderful connection Diego and I have is not built on grandma/grandson stuff, not on 'Are your grades good?' but on the fact that we really really like each other and have a commonality of interests. We are comfortable together and I would never dream of asking him anything that would make him cringe. And I learn a lot. (I could be stranded on an island with him, my bottom line.)

After one pure day of Diego with us, his aunt and five year old cousin Quincy, arrived. Diego is stellar with small kids (he has a much younger little brother he adores). Quincy loves Diego and the two of them spent some very hot moments with Quincy riding his bike a quarter mile up the road to show off his 'stick garden' to Diego. (Quincy has artfully placed sticks in a mound of rocks we use to fill in holes in the driveway)

It was certainly a very special day for me to have these two kids- my oldest and youngest grandsons- enjoying each other and loving being here in this perfect place together.

I dare not think, I dare not hope, that Diego will choose to go to college here in Florida. So smart and accomplished, he could go anywhere. But it is his decision, he knows what he needs and I respect his decision, whatever it is. We would all love it so much if he would be part of the Florida family.

Being a grandparent is the best! Two of my grandchildren, Joe and Caroline, live so far away we rarely get to see them. I must be content with frequent photos and phone calls, and knowing that the other grandparents who are closer are keeping watch and celebrating them on each milestone. Perhaps, one day Joe and Caroline will be in our neighborhood. I hope!

Our east coast grandsons are known to us; they visit often enough to keep the family vision fresh and we have so many tracks of them on this property. Perhaps one of them, or their western cousins, will be interested enough in this magnificent place to make a claim. We'll see.

My daughter and I spent some time in the so-called vegetable garden this afternoon. There must have been twenty kinds of butterflies. We smiled!

The Responsibility for Other People's Happiness

We have recently bought Gail Collin's book on the history of women during the last fifty years. Andy is engrossed in it and I am itching to get my hands on it because this was my time in history!

I was in the 'sandwich generation', squeezed between what was and what is now for women. I was fortunate to be able to look forward and determined to get all that I could. I never wanted to be like our mothers, though I have taken in my mental baggage many wonderful things from them.

Coming of age in the early sixties, and pretty idiosyncratic even then, I knew that my own personal bottom line was that I needed to have good work that would financially support me and the kids. (If Andy were to fall off a cliff!) Of course, this was not necessary. My husband was the primary bread winner. But this fact never deterred me from working every single year of my life. And it was up to me to figure out what to do after working a full day, about child care, cooking, shopping, house maintenance, and the daily crap of taking kids to their athletic, educational, and artistic places, and taking care of the pets. But work was sustaining.

The most tender and meaningful thing my husband ever said to me (and he has said it often) is that he didn't know and was oblivious at the time. So were all men then. My husband made five times in salary what I did and so I thought at first, anyway, that this was what one settled for. We so often thought then that there was a numerical value to what one did. i.e. I am a woman and I make a lot less than a man and so I am of less value.

I see our daughter, now in law school, who never doubts the fact that she will ultimately be responsible for making her life. No one ever told her she would have to settle for less because she's a woman. She doesn't have to make any sense of this crap we put on ourselves back then. We expect her, of course, to be as responsible for her choices as her brothers.

I see my assertive grand daughter who will never know about all this. She'll take her place as a person in America, same as her brother. She'll be able to do anything!

I still have the legacy of my age in being responsible for other people's happiness. I constantly think about what would please others. Tentatively, I am now being assertive about not doing the things I used to do (and hated!). I will not go to loud banquets seated at tables of ten.

Ten years ago, my same-aged friend, Marie, and I began taking annual trips to Central and South America and other places. We experienced many amazing things, but most of all those times were time outs of having to be responsible for the happiness of others. Those times have been so golden!

Our daughters most likely would have no idea what we were about. And this is what we have wanted all along; we want our daughters to be truly on an equal footing with men - and they are!

And yet.. women have always been the care-takers and the ones responsible for others' happiness. In some ways this is the best.

What do you think?

Friends

The wild flowers and the butterflies are wonderful these last hot days of fall. In the vegetable garden the flowers are rampant above the broccoli and beans and eggplant. Lettuces are available in abundance. We are in the dry season so each day I must water all the gardens.

I am thinking about so many wonderful friends I have in my life. Connecting with them takes hours each day, lots like watering the plants. If you don't do it, they will dry up and die. Each weekend brings friends to our guest house and each day brings e-mails and phone calls. When some friend or other is in crisis, the messages and calls fly back and forth. Our near neighbors drop by with produce and local talk.

In some ways, I am quite a hermit here, loving this place as I do. Sometimes I know that I have a few days that do not have anything on the calendar that I must do. But it doesn't stack up quite like that.

We have been working on the gardens every day, clearing out the debris and cutting back the wild growth from the summer. Andy cut and stacked logs for the fireplace today. Our weekend guests, who are staying on, always help out with the things that need attention.

Tomorrow is my volunteer day at Lacoochee. We'll be making pasta, and I'll read to the kids. The next day, I'll be volunteering at SunFlower School in Gulfport and I'll be making Flubber!

To be truthful, I am finally beginning to love retirement.

Those Lacoochee kids

Today I went to do my usual Tuesday gig with a class at Lacoochee Elementary School. Each Tuesday I go to do some cooking with Rachel Aguilar's class. Though I never cook at home, I am still pretty competent. We are putting together a class cook book to include all the things we have made. So far: fruit salad, green salad, and smoothies. Next week, we will make pasta with tomato sauce. (The kids suggested doing huge gooey sundaes, but I demurred. They know I am into healthy fat-free cooking.) There are two classroom volunteers, wonderful Mexican ladies who are very helpful without being asked. I have invited them to help me prepare some Mexican dishes. Their eyes light up and I know that we are going to have a great time with this.

The kids, like all kids, love the hands-on stuff. And so do we all! What will these kids remember about this week? The smoothies, of course. They will not remember the drudge from the dog-eared science or social studies texts. Kids are like adults (but they are beaten back!) : they respond to the immediate and interesting in their environment. They tune out the boring and repetitive stuff.

I certainly get a good feeling in this classroom. The kids want to please and most of the time there is a harmonic hum going on. They love their teacher and they see in her such possibilities. In fact, it is such a good classroom, I think these kids could do a whole lot more in terms of investigating everything and anything.

But we have the dreaded FCAT and all its many tests and preparatory tests and prepreparatory tests etc. Teachers, nowadays are considered to be idiots, and must be led through every part of teaching. (Thanks to Houghten Mifflen and the others who rake in the money) These teachers are NOT idiots, and given the task they have, they do their best.

They do not have enough time on the present schedule! They cannot read out loud every single day to the kids (though all the research says that this is key to making good readers). Most kids do not have time every day to hunker down and read their good book. There is not enough time for kids to explore math or science or social studies. (When, in this public school, have I seen the kids working on a project about Lewis and Clark or John Adams or de Soto or Columbus that was not something canned and on a worksheet to be filled out in fifteen minutes?)

These things take time, not just 30 minutes. A kid could spend the whole day or a whole week or a whole month researching what people ate on the trail out west with Lewis and Clark. And on and on. FCAT does not take into consideration how children think and act. Or, teachers, for that matter.

Our teachers, so stellar for the most part, need to get up on their hind legs and say, "Enough is enough! Let us teach!"

Cold front!

Today is what we Floridians have been wishing and hoping for. Last week we had a hot spell that made all of us think we were in Puerto Rico in July. We complained like crazy as the beads of sweat poured down our armpits and we couldn't think of how in the world we could ever venture outside in such heat. And now, it is cool, even cold! We all spent the last two days outside in our gardens, reducing the biomass, pruning stuff, actually looking at the damage the heat and drought brought. We all found those sweaters from last year, old friends.

The giant mutant cosmos you see in the photo are full of butterflies. These plants are so heavy , that many of them have toppled over. Soon, when they have finished their profligate blooming, we will uproot them and throw the carcasses over the fence. This morning I tackled the water garden and took out at least half of the plants. I discovered many treasures in the process. The pancake plant had many pups and a monarch coccoon and a very cute jumping spider. I replanted this, cut off the pups to be planted in a different place.

Andy spent the morning pruning the dead wood out of the citrus trees that took such a hit last winter in the freezes. Tomorrow I will attack the asparagus bed, so overgrown over the summer.

The vegetable garden was so wimpy during the last heat wave, but, now, in just a couple of days, it has perked up. Tonight we had eggplant, beans, lettuce and herbs for dinner. I am emotionally unable to remove those wonderful butterfly attracting volunteer plants in the vegetable garden, so when I work out there, I am surrounded by Monarchs, Queens, yellow sulfurs, zebra long wings, tiger swallowtails, black swallowtails, and so many others. They are all busy with the red sage, volunteer zinnias and milkweed. How could I possibly remove their food source? The peas seem to love these cool days and cold nights and are tightly clinging to the fence.

The armadillos are working at night digging up the yard. I have managed to trap one big mama and I have released her far from here. But more come. At least they haven't so far breached the fence around the vegetables.

The night is full of stars and bats. The insects that call in the evening are in full cry. The green tree frogs are massing on our windows, intent on catching any moth that comes by. I am thinking that soon I'll be under my quilt with my husband and dog, all of us happy to be here in this magical place.

The Last Milestone

When we walked the mile or so to our newspaper box up the road this morning I rejoiced to see so many wildflowers blooming along the way. I scattered the seeds for these more than a year ago in honor of the passing of the mother of one of my friends, and now they are flourishing in tiny bursts of yellow and blue and white. I think of this area as Trudy's place.

Nearer to the house I tend the small orange tree we planted in memory of Ray, our neighbor for many years, who lived well into his nineties. I have memorial plants all over the place: some were given to me by the people who have died, and the plants live on. Others have been planted in honor of people I have known who have passed on. My mother-in-law, my old best friend, lives on in a tree planted in her memory on a Connecticut hillside. Betty's tree.

I made a decision many years ago that I could not attend funerals for the parents of my friends. I think I am better at planting trees or wildflowers in their honor, or maybe just spending time looking at the stars on a clear night, knowing that one of those stars is the essence of the person who has lived and died.

This seems to be the season of the end of life for the parents of many of my friends. I have been through this season a few years ago because I was a late child of an old mother. My mother died at a ripe old age and I was privileged to be present in her sweet last days. She died in the west, and we had a raucous musical memorial there, but her last wish was to be buried next to my father in North Carolina. So, I dutifully accompanied the casket across country (with two changes!)

On a cold wet day in November, colorful leaves plastered to the ground, my daughter and I witnessed her burial next to her husband. All my tears had been shed.

Every death is different, and yet has common elements. Right now I am cheering on the mother of my best friend, who has such life force, despite being eighty-five and on dialysis.

We willingly take on the responsibilities of caring for our parents in their last days. What we don't know until the last of our time with them is how much it means to us to have these moments with them as ours.

After your parent dies you quickly get over the grotty details. My mother told me such a lot of things about our family and who she was and a lot about the books she read and funny stories. I would not ever have missed this time with her! We laughed a lot. I never think much about the moments of turning her in her bed, bringing the bed pan.

I am not attending funerals and memorials. I am planting things and thinking about how much these old people have contributed to our life, not to mention life itself.

After the death of a parent, after the raw grieving, there comes a time to think or say, "Mom said.. Mom thought.. Dad used to.." And then you know that generations pass along, you're just a part of it, and it's up to your kids.

Generations

Here are Devin, 21, and Quincy, 4, riding their bikes in the extreme heat of this Florida autumn. I snap this photo today and what is on my mind is the concern I feel for their generations. Devin is working on her senior college honors project in ceramics, and Quincy is nearly new and works hard at everything. What in the world will life hold for them? Right now they are smiling and moving forward at a rapid pace to get a glass of ice water. Soon, they'll be moving forward into life as citizens of this planet.

I awoke to the news that Obama had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace! Twelve hours later the pundits and the nattering nabobs say their pieces as they will. Some say it is all political as a powerful message that Obama should take this as a boot for the U.S. to get out of Afghanistan, or whatever..

What I choose to believe is that the Nobel Committee simply recognized the power and drive of this good and brilliant man to make a better world for mankind. He's not been able to accomplish much yet, having had to face enormous tasks and the opposition and fear of change from people, especially Congress. I hope Obama will navigate these extremely difficult times. He's a pleaser for sure. He must carefully tread the delicate line between what he sees as the best way to make this world a better place, and the noisy naysayers who are out to thwart him at every turn. But he is a good man, and I think is genuine in his desire to bring everyone to the table of good conscience.

In this era that brought so much greed and corruption culminating in such an economic decline, our ship of state is large and slow to turn around. I am privileged to have lived to see this time. I feel confident that if anyone could do it - pay attention to global warming, the economy, health care, and our involvement in Afghanistan, and begin to find solutions, it will be Obama.

Devin and Quincy are counting on how this turns out. Their world will be different from ours, for sure. We cannot leave to them a world with nuclear weapons always threatening to annihilate us all, or a country that leaves so many with no health care, or a planet that becomes ever hotter and polluted, or belief systems that disparage segments of human populations.

Tonight, I feel just a small bit more optimistic.

The "defectives"

To get to our place (paradise!), you have to go over the railroad tracks and wend your way through rural America. You'll see plenty of trailers and small block homes, citrus groves and yards of chickens. For the most part these places are house proud and neat.

But there is one place that fascinates me every time I pass it. It is so politically incorrect, but we call the people who live there "the defectives". I don't know them and I have never spoken to any of them. The many children who spill out of the yard and into the road never fail to give any passerby the finger. They don't return our neighborly waves. There is a man in a wheel chair who sits under his confederate flag. I had thought he might be a Viet Nam vet, but I find out he became disabled as a result of a drunken driver event. He is covered with tattoos.

The house is a small wooden shack and in front is an amazing array of derelict plastic toys, broken bikes, trash, pit pulls chained to a post, and old cars with their hoods up, exploding automotive innards. Usually there is a fire burning in the beaten earth yard. Right on the dirt road is a dysfunctional play set placed in the tall shrubs. Whatever the hour, day, night, morning or evening, a posse of young adults lounge there.

I could completely bypass this house by going the other way, straight up Puckett Road to the main paved road into town. But usually, I do not because I am interested in the lives of these people and I am a voyeur I suppose. I am expecting something to happen. Last week, it did. One of them tried to shoot someone else. This person was arrested and no one was actually shot. Of course the obvious thing here at this place must be something to do with the manufacture or sale of drugs.

But now, the posse still sits there at all hours, the kids come and go (looks like a couple of them go to school, and they look like any kids on their way to the bus with their backpacks.) All summer I worried about all those disheveled people without a/c, and the kids out in the road.

On my slow way past this house (no way am I going to run over a child!) I imagine stopping and talking to them, maybe offering them some vegetables and fruit from our place. I have imagined inviting the kids to come for a swim in our pool. But I don't.

Such a vast chasm in our country between the rich and the poor. I see it every day and feel powerless.

Tending to the gardens

At the end of the month I am going to get a new and very much more powerful computer! Look for changes to this blog.

Meanwhile I am still spending a couple of hours each day weeding and tweaking the gardens. The vegetables are coming along. No longer will we have to buy the pitiful lettuces picked days ago in California. Our ugli tomatoes are ripening and we have enough eggplant to supply all of Italy. The beans are in blossom and the greens are getting big enough to peel off some leaves. Broccoli is starting to make heads. I have to figure out how to harvest the sweet potatoes that have been growing all the hot summer.

I have heavily mulched everything with the cheapest hay I can buy from the feed store and the cuttings from mowing the grass. I enjoy the many butterflies zooming around as I weed and mulch and water. The colorful monarch caterpillars are busily eating the milkweed that I could not bear to pull up. Their chrysalises hang everywhere. The volunteer zinnias have inserted themselves in every corner of the garden, even in the paths. The butterflies so love them, I can't pull them up just yet. I apply the summer's worth of compost around the plants.

It is still beastly hot so all this activity must happen before mid morning when I could keel over from heat stroke. I vow every day that I will weed and feed the asparagus bed, but so far nothing has happened. I have weeded the rose bed and mulched it with grass cuttings. Tomorrow I will sort out the rampant growth around the lily pond, though I do love the sheer exuberance of all those flowers. The giant mutant cosmos are now eight feet tall and in full bloom.

We put out the bird feeders for the new migrants from the north and all winter we'll enjoy these noisy birds. The hummingbirds have returned to Mexico and we have taken down their feeders. Soon, the chimney swifts will vacate in time for the fall fires we hope to have in the fireplace.

The fall wild flowers are blooming like crazy. I can't identify most of them yet. The wildflower books are no help, so I just enjoy them as we do our two mile morning walk to get the newspaper.

Tending the garden is a lot like the tending I do for family and friends. It takes every day time, a lot of it. This week I reconnected with two wonderful young friends, Hey-soon, and her brother, Jeh-whan. Former students of mine, they are now launched and both engaged in horticulture and solar energy, some of my main interests. And, Laura, my old book editor, now graduated from college and about to launch into-what? And Nick, in high school now on the straight path to something brilliant. I love these young people who come to visit and keep in touch and require things and trade books with me and know I will always have room for them. At times it is exhausting.

Sometimes it feels weird to be so old and to have young people actually want to visit so often. I am not particularly wise or anything, and not of much use to society anymore. Probably I am still fun and I am a good listener and I challenge them. Whatever, I love having them visit and we feel blessed that this peaceable kingdom is a place where people want to come. We tend the gardens.

It's a lot of hard physical work, but also a kind of meditation to tend to your garden. In every way.

Being in the garden

Here is a photo of the first quilt I ever made and it hangs in our bedroom now. It represents the vegetable garden from the top to bottom. The actual quilting was so awful, I recently reprocessed it as a wall hanging for our newly painted green bedroom. I made the panels a few years ago, one by one, as I traveled, and it represents my garden from top to bottom.

I am still there. I am still planting those same veggies and a lot more. I have learned so much since then. I know what will grow in our climate and I know about watering and fertilizing. I know, for example, that one should not grow tomatoes in the fall because as late bloomers, they will die in the December or January freezes.

Today I went to my favorite store, Farmers' Feed, where they had a cornucopia of seedlings. I bought all sorts - kolrabi, spinach, red cabbage and many onion sets. Tomorrow I will plant everything, poking holes to place them in the heavy hay mulch. The broccoli, beans, carrots and collards are doing well and the left over eggplants and peppers are really producing. (With thirteen eggplants on the table, the cook (Andy) made an exquisite eggplant casserole for dinner.

I am still thinking about having chickens, especially after reading the Susan Orlean article in last week's New Yorker. My family continues to be negative on this issue.

Everyone in our neighborhood has been absolutely manic about the first cool days of fall. We want to go out and DO. And I will go out tomorrow and plant those seedling vegetables in the cool of the morning.

We live in a terrible summer climate, but when the change comes, we know it's paradise for the next six months.

Fall!

While we were away for nine days in Colombia, the rains happened and everything grew. The vegetable garden we rely on is covered with weeds threatening to overwhelm the seedlings I had left in pristine mulched rows and mounds. The lawn needed cutting.

After two days of recovering from Montezuma's revenge, doing all the trip laundry, tending to hundreds of e-mails and family needs and reassuring the dog, I am back! Everyone in Florida is excited that there is going to be a cold front coming through tonight (they say). After the extreme heat and humidity in Colombia, it already seems cool to me.

The giant cosmos have started to bloom and the hummingbirds have left and soon the chimney swifts will be on their way and we will not hear their twitter until next spring. I see a few love bugs beginning to mass for their fall invasion. We need to put up our bird feeders for the returning migrants.

I left the automatic watering on for the vegetable garden and I see that the sweet potatoes are lush and there is enough eggplant to feed an army. The broccoli and collards I planted before I left are doing well, and even the carrots and peas are pushing up through the weeds. The summer zinnias have repopulated themselves from dropped seed heads and I must transplant them to more suitable places in planters I have next to the front door. The lettuce in the raised beds are almost big enough to pick. Deer tongue and black seeded simpson have grown well, but it was obviously too hot for the rest of the mesclun to germinate. The beans have been attacked by the grasshoppers but they will recover. Wild red sage grows rampantly everywhere, even in the vegetable garden. I hate to take it out because it is such a butterfly attractor and I can love even weeding when I am surrounded by those huge tiger swallowtails and gulf fritillaries and monarchs and all the others. I love seeing the queen butterfly caterpillars eating away at the milkweed. So, I cannot remove these plants, not yet!

The compost pile is now perfect, sweet and crumbly brown, and I can dig out just what I need to spread around the vegetables. Just next to the compost pile is our old time friend, the giant gopher tortoise who comes out and hisses when I am out there sweating in the garden. And the cows come to the fence hoping for some collard leaves or a scratch on the head.

But the BEST was the orchids that live in the swimming pool enclosure and are all in glorious bloom.

Now that we have a sniff of cool weather, we have so much to do outside. The asparagus bed, and the roses, and the wild place outside the screen porch. They all need tending. All potential!

Colombia

Here is the best house in a village in the Sierra Nevada of Colombia. Look carefully and you can see the baby sleeping on a cot, dogs near by. I was so charmed by the amazing saturated colors of the houses in the cities and the villages. It was in this village that the women had a business of making wallets and bags out of recycled potato chip bags. (I hear they sell for big bucks in a boutique in Miami)

We went on a nine day trip to Colombia. People were surprised that we would go to this known dangerous place. We went to do the work of The Nature Conservancy, a huge non-profit organization that buys land, or the rights to it, all over the globe. The idea is to preserve natural spaces, and depending on the place, this means that the Conservancy protects land, forests, water, and indigenous peoples.

In Colombia, we were here to partner with this country on a program to protect water. The Colombians need to have clean water for fisheries and for drinking. We North Americans cannot imagine what it means not to have clean water because we think of it as a given. In the bay of Cartagena, the water is so polluted, it looks gray. One wonders about the fish they catch there. The lobster fisheries are all but dead, coral reefs are bleached, the forests are decimated for the most part. "Green" is not in vogue here in Colombia.

In the Sierra Nevada of Colombia, miles north of Cartagena, there are four indigenous peoples living on various levels of the mountains. Each of these tribes has a population of twenty thousand, give or take, and they speak different languages. We spoke to a leader from the Gogi community. This was a short brown man with long wavy hair who wore a compact straw hat and loose linen clothes. He seemed completely at ease with this bunch of gringo tourists. I immediately loved him.

His people live simply; they are self sustaining. They believe that people on earth must compensate for the damage they do to nature. So they, the Gogis make compensation in the way of ceremonial stones they place here and there. The Nature Conservancy employs anthropologists to help us understand these indigenous people, because, after all, it is these people who are so important to conserving nature (if we can only listen)

We are working together. It was an amazing time and I will be forever changed for it.

If you want to see more photos, let me know. You can comment.

My life in the Country

It has been a bad patch lately what with having to do the hour and a half commute into town for this and that. But, when we are home here it is our habit to walk out before breakfast the even mile to the mail box to get the papers. There is always a changing landscape, always something to see along the route.

Today, Andy discovered a small box turtle in the middle of the sandy track. I picked him up and placed him on route to going back into the swamp. We could hear the red shouldered hawks, hunting as a pair and cranes in the distance. The regular cardinals and warblers were in their usual places along the road, and today we saw the deer we know looking at us and then bounding off into the thicket showing us their friendly white behinds.

Just at dawn it isn't that hot, but we are longing for the change in the weather that each fall eventually makes us energetic about gardening and cutting wood for the winter. The fall garden is coming along. The lettuces, beans, broccoli and peas are up. I can just about see the carrots emerging. While working in the vegetable garden this morning I have never seen so many butterflies! They are attracted to the red sage and milkweed I left when I earlier did such an aggressive weeding. The weeds, particularly the wandering jew and pennywort keep on emerging and I keep on covering them with heavy hay. Our picnic table and the wooden boards on the garden fence are now festooned with butterfly chrysalises. I check them daily, hoping to see the instant those butterflies emerge.

Tomorrow we are going off for a week in Colombia to look at rain forests. It is supposed to rain here, but just to be safe I have my water timer on in the vegetable garden. The orchids will have to adapt, the dog is going to stay with her special friends.

Today is my daughter's birthday! I am glad that I am not now in the throes of labor, but I am so glad I once was on this very day. It was worth it! How amazing it has been to be the mother to this child, the daughter under my heart.

So, I am off to birding in Colombia for eight days.

Becoming Old

While driving from St. Pete to Dade City early this morning in a driving rain I realized that my shoulders were hurting from the strain of trying to see in the dark, navigating carefully on the slick interstate. I thought of the last decade of my life and how many life-changing events there have been in the last ten years.

On my sixtieth birthday our whole family gathered for a wonderful frolic in south England in a rented manor house. This was a few months before 9/11, and it was a wonderful and carefree two weeks. Since then, we have had national upheavals of a major kind, and family changes: a divorce, two marriages, three more grandchildren born, another split, many changes. My husband and I retired from many years of work and we saw our fortunes diminish in the recession. We rejoiced in the election of Obama and believed that change was coming.

I am gleeful with my life in retirement! I have the time to pursue my artistic bent. I work all the time making quilts, painting, making pottery and writing. My memoir about my thirty-five years of teaching was recently published. I volunteer. I am making a network here in my new community. I am a devoted gardener and have already put in the fall vegetable garden. My husband spends time on the property and makes furniture and volunteers as the chair of The Nature Conservancy in Florida. We work on our land, fixing fences, mowing, removing the soda apples- those invasive plants we have agreed to get rid of since our land is in a conservation trust for Florida.

When we go to the city, where we have a lovely town house, there is nothing to do except water the cacti. When we lived there full time, we were working at our intense jobs, keeping going from day to day. Now, when we infrequently go there it is to see friends, attend board meetings, volunteer at our grandson's school. Our daughter and her son and my sister who live there in St. Pete keep us going each week.

But it is here on the ranch where we live that our hearts are. Quincy, our grandson who visits often, calls it his 'other house', and indeed, he has his own room and toys here. He knows where everything is and he's comfortable with everything. And to me, this is heaven, where I go out each day to look at the birds and the wild flowers and check the level of water in the swamp. And, at night I look at the bats flying and the magnificent stars that keep me humble. Every day is a new adventure and I feel such wonder and thankfulness that I could be here in this peaceable kingdom. I love sharing it with Quincy.

But when we go to our town house in the city, it seems pretty thin soup, though we love to see our friends. Everyone needs to have a purpose. At home here on the ranch we have a purpose of doing the daily ranch chores, making our art, community work, work for Florida. And how long can this last? (I am thinking twenty years.)

So, getting old is not so easy! Your kids never think of you as anything but the energetic people they used to know.

What continues throughout life are the agonizing questions that can have no answer.

End of Summer

The huge poke weeds are in bloom with lovely white jiggly blossoms that will then turn into shiny black berries beloved by the backyard birds. The season is changing slowly into fall. Though it still hits ninety degrees in the middle of the day, evenings are cooler.

Truth be told, it's beastly hot to do any garden work, but we know we must get the vegetable garden in by around labor day in these parts of Central Florida or we'll be caught by the January freeze. I have learned to plant lots of things that can stand a light frost - broccoli, collards, peas, lettuce, kale, chard and carrots. The left over peppers, tomatoes and eggplant from summer die dramatically at the first hint of freeze.

Last week we sweated out there in the garden, weeding, restapling the deer fence that had been torn down by the heavy morning glories, (a mistake!) and mulching with hay and grass clippings. A few days later, I put the collard and broccoli seedlings into holes I poked in the thick mulch. For the row crops, I hoed a thin strip of mulch away to sow the seeds. Later, as the plants emerge, I will add compost and more mulch. After renewing them with a few bags of new potting soil the raised salad beds have been planted with lettuces, chard and celery. In this heat I have devised a cover for them made out of old black screening that had once been panels over the pool but had rips. Still good enough for the garden. (Don't waste anything!)

I used to want at the start of gardening season to have a freshly tilled new area. Straight rows, no weeds in sight. Tidy. Problem with this was that the weeds very rapidly took over! The soil wasn't getting any better and it was hard to keep the garden watered since the soil was open to the blistering sun and beating rain.

I happened to read a book called "Lasagna Gardening". Talk about an epiphany! Naturally, things fall from above: rain, leaves, pine needles, dust, sunshine, blessings. Earth wants to be covered like a Muslim woman. This works!

I started out with my weed patch, kind of daunting as a prospective place to grow food. I took the always voluminous piles of newspapers and covered the whole garden with thicknesses of them, hosed everything down, covered it with anything I could find in the way of mulch - sawdust from the furniture studio, hay from a neighbor, mulch from a tree we had cut down and shredded. After a few weeks I put in the vegetable garden, poking holes in the mulch and noticing that worms had arrived in force.

That's history! Now, I just have to put mulch on the weeds as they sprout. The armadillos and deer were a major problem for a few years. I tried all kinds of dried pee from various predatory animals (bought at some cost from garden products catalogs), and sprays, and tying soap on stakes. What ultimately worked was that my husband installed a proper fence that was buried more than a foot deep, and I found that his old neckties fluttering from a wire above the fence scared the deer away. (They now eat the roses!)

It's important to rotate the planting of your vegetables from place to place in the garden with each new season. I keep notes on what was planted where, so I know to get the tomatoes in a bed they have not seen in a couple of years. Another tip: beans and peas do very much better if you put bean inoculant in the rows as you plant the seeds. You can get this at any of the seed companies.

So, I am smug with those vegetables like new born kids. You never know! Last spring I bought twenty seeds of a special heirloom tomato cultivar. I planted them in little seed starting pots and watered them with my sweat. Later, I planted them in the garden. Immediately, the tomato hornworms attacked, eating all the vines down to sticks. The rest of the modern robust tomatoes did fine by Florida standards. Much later, I noticed that my husband's garden of shrubs had a volunteer tomato plant, more robust than any tomato of the season. Throughout the wiltingly hot summer, this tomato plant thrived on neglect and set many fruits. This brave tomato must have grown from a seed from the compost we put on the shrubs. Our kitchen bowl is still full of these funny looking heirloom tomatoes and they are a daily addition to the salad.

Being here, out in the boonies, is the greatest gift. Growing stuff, vegetables and flowers, admiring the wild flowers so prolific right now, watching the swamp fill and seeing otters and ibis and alligators and deer every day. Quincy, our four year old grandson, comes often. He's getting to know the territory, riding his bike way up the road, looking for the butterfly chrysalises and tree frogs.

Time to go look for the bats.

The Supreme Pragmatist

Still too hot and rainy to do anything much in the garden, but a lot of it is mulched with grass left over from mowing and there is most of a round bale of hay out there to mulch the paths. It is all still potential.

So I went to Lacoochee school today to attend one of the monthly community organization meetings. I know these meetings have a long string to play out (and I am not good at hanging out!). There is an agenda but everything is very free form, not the 'get it done, everyone out the door in an hour stuff I do at other board meetings. But I find it amazing to attend. Lacoochee is quite like a third world country - and in our midst!

There were about fifteen people there; retirees who are devoted to the community, the usual representatives from the sherrif's department and the parks, neighborhood crime watch, and the Girls and Boys Club, United Way, community health, concerned citizens (I am one of those), the wonderfully energetic media specialist at the school, some volunteers. We are all ages and colors and sizes. Notably lacking is representation from the Hispanic community which is what this title one school is all about.

We all grab cups of watery coffee and pastries encased in cellophane and chat a few minutes about livestock and other country matters. Then the school principal comes in, and as usual, I cannot help noticing the similarities to Dolly Parton - the speech cadence and the face. She is totally mesmerizing as she stands there in the horseshoe configuration of the tables where we sit. She says she is not a speaker, but a a talker. And what a talker! She includes every single person by name and eye contact as she talks. She leaves spaces for comments. This is better than going to church! She has stories, right on point.

For three hours we are all riveted. "If it's the best for kids, that's what we'll do". And she does. She gets grants, ekes out funds for a child to go to Shands Hospital in Gainesville every month for treatment for a cleft sinus. She is always looking, looking for ways to help these kids who live in this small piss poor comunity in rural Florida. She BELIEVES! She believes in children and in the education that will take them where they need to be. She will give them wings to fly.

Her politics are strictly pragmatic. I can sense that she is uncomfortable with the heavy load of testing our state mandates. But she'll work with the system, tweaking what she can. This woman never gives up, even through the dense red fog of bureaucracy.

When I first began volunteering at this community school, I was too judgmental, fresh as I was from being director of a private school where we had the freedom to invent without the tenacious fingers of the state and nation dictating our outcomes. (Also, the kids were those priveledged ones)

This community organizing meeting today was so affirming to me about the way we Americans can effect change. We are a generous and energetic people and we try hard. The bottom line, as this principal says, is the kids.

Anniversary Today

Here is our son, Chris, receiving a birthday gift from his three year old daughter, Caroline. She had collected some perfectly white stones from a driveway we were walking past earlier in the day, and she knew this would be the perfect birthday gift for her dad. Her brother, Joe, has his eye on the chocolate pendant he gave his dad, hoping he'll share it.

This day is also our 49th wedding anniversary. Forty-four years ago we were in a hospital giving birth to this man who is now a father. Tonight I thank god I am not in labor, but in a local restaurant eating salmon and reminiscing with my old spouse about the good times and the bad- and how we got over them. The best thing is our kids and our grandchildren. We are so fortunate to be still closely connected to all of them, funny and weird as they and all of us are.

We have been so blessed! What a wonderful trip it has been with Andy the grandpa, the spouse, the main provider, the maker of things and the most interesting person I know. He's the person who is comfortable in the White House and in our house as he vacuums and dusts and fixes the plumbing. We have been to all the world's continents in all kinds of situations. We have had audiences with heads of states and we have camped in primitive conditions. We have dealt with cancer and end of life issues with our parents, and the deaths of siblings. We have talked our heads off and worried beyond sanity about our children and the state of the world.

There were quite a few times when we didn't think we would make this marriage work. Somehow, it did. We have too much history now to abandon such an interesting relationship. Both of us had compellingly interesting work and a wonderful family of three children and many more kids who came to us from time to time.

I celebrate this day, my oldest son's birthday, and our anniversary of a most intensely interesting and loving marriage.

Philanthrophy

While I am waiting for the weather to break so I can start planting my seeds, the phone rings several times a day. These are people wanting MONEY. Sometimes, when the caller is identified, I don't pick up because I know they'll say," How are you tonight, ma'am?" (Why would a perfect stranger want to know how I am?? Should I really tell them?) Sometimes I am caught and that familiar hot toast feeling engulfs me. I know I am about to feel guilty about kids who are dying of various diseases, birds that are going extinct, people who are in jail for no good reason, police and fire departments that are going broke, universities that need funds, politicians that need help, polar bears who have lost their ice floes, and the local orchestra that needs major support. I believe in all these causes! This is hard. All these and many more smell blood (money).

Americans have traditionally been among the most generous globally. When there is a disaster- earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, volcano eruption, we pony up. Americans have given generously through their churches who funnel the funds to the needy. We give to United Way in our workplaces. But we are unwilling to be taxed.

I know very few people who donate to charities. I see the lists of donors in the back of the programs for the arts in our community. These are generally prosperous people (as are we) and they can be counted upon to support the arts or the hospital, or CASA, or whatever. I do know that it is a very tough sell to get board members to donate to the institution of the board on which they sit!

It is even a harder sell to get the younger generation to donate to a philanthropic cause. I do believe that to whom much is given, much is expected. Some people tithe to their churches. We, not church goers, have always done this, and more.

I am not aware that most of my friends and family give to charities. Some are pinching every penny, I know. This world needs some redistribution of wealth and if you can give five bucks to saving polar bears or sick kids or your local orchestra, go for it. It's only a super size burger away, and hey, your body will appreciate it.

Thanks from Pollyanna!

The Fall Garden Begins

Middle of August and the days are so hot you can barely breathe. But I have already received my seed order and I finger the crisp packets of many kinds of lettuce, celery, carrots, chard, beets, arugula, broccoli raab, kale, peas, and other vegetables. There are no tomato seeds, or eggplants or peppers. These are the hot weather things I know will not have the time to come to harvest before the frost in December. I will buy broccoli and collard seedlings at the farm store, and maybe I will go for cauliflower and brussels sprouts. In the last couple of years there seem to be more choices.

The compost pile has been cooking all summer, ready to be spread over the seed beds. Right now, the vegetable garden is a mess! I have been weeding the beds when it is cool in the mornings, but I haven't the heart to take out the morning glories adorning the fence or the zinnias or the milkweed that so attract the butterflies and hummingbirds. I will do it the last week of August when we return from a cool visit to Seattle.

Our vegetable garden is quite small, 200 square feet or so, enclosed by a six foot chicken wire fence that is buried a foot to deter the armadillos. A string flies above the fence from pole to pole and it has old neckties attached to it at intervals. I am convinced this fluttering fabric deters the deer. Some years ago, I became convinced that top down, no weed gardening was the way to go. So I pile on the mulch, never till. When it is time to plant I just pull back the mulch for the row I want to plant, apply some compost and stick in the seeds. It works!

Last year, almost all the vegetables we ate came from our own garden. (Yes, we certainly ate a LOT of broccoli and snow peas!) But there was so much else! We had wonderful salad greens every day, carrots, beets, peas, eggplant, tomatoes, herbs. The innovation of last year was the salad garden tables. We have two of these raised beds on legs that grow only salads. They are immune from the burrowing of armadillos and nibbling of rabbits, and they are so easy to weed and harvest!

But it is still the hottest part of summer and the next harvest is only a glimmer in my eye, some seed packets, and a fantasy for our table. We are devoted to growing organic. The fall garden is not so prone to the predations of hot weather bugs so it's easier than the spring garden. There are not so many tomato horn worms or stink bugs to contend with.

I want you to try vegetable gardening! Not only good eating, good exercise, fascinating scientific interests, it is good for the soul.

In subsequent posts I will let you know more about this garden. Ask questions!

One of the Best Things

Our nephew, Dan from California, visited us in Florida off and on from the time he was a very small boy. He got it in his head that he'd like to live here. After he graduated from Santa Cruz and batted around for a few years being a chef, he arrived here, a graduate student in Marine science. By this time we had despaired of having any of our children want to live here; they were all far away leading their lives (as we had taught them).
When Dan arrived, I was so happy. I never had any expectation that a member of the family would like to live here! Dan was always one we could count on (to take care of pets, house, emotional needs of his cousins.) Dan borrows money from us and pays it back, has the keys to our houses and hearts. He comes to visit us on the holidays and many other times as well. He is Family!
Sometimes we don't hear from him for days. But we always know he's there! A few years ago he began bringing Inia for family visits. Inia is a beautiful, smart, accomplished and lovely person ( and also a marine scientist on her way to the PhD) and all of us hoped this was becoming permanent.
They married last month, in her native Puerto Rico, and we all celebrated! Dan is finding that his niche is in teaching, and it seems he has much talent for the work. I hope they'll stay here in the neighborhood, at least for now. I do celebrate everyday. I hope their lives will be interesting, and I also hope they'll be here for a long time. Whatever happens, this time Dan has been here has been the best of the best for me.
As Grandma, I would love to see a grand niece or nephew or two.. But, in any case, I do appreciate the years with Dan, and now Inia.

One of the Best Things

The night time heebie jeebies

Usually I sleep like a rock in my high canopy bed, so quiet here miles away from anything. Sometimes I hear the calls of the owls and the hissing of the deer, and when the moon is full, as it has been these last few nights, I am awakened by the brilliant light of it, pure and white, beckoning me to wander out onto the porches and wonder at the beauty of such light falling on pastures and the sleeping cows.

But lately, I awake in the middle of the night, and I am afraid for this country I love. The media from the right and left is too shrill, too pandering to their own interests, too eager to tweak the worst in us.

I voted for Obama because I thought he was truly a good man and had the heart and strength to put forth his ideas of making this country great again. I believed Obama had a mission to make this country work. I still think this. I am disheartened with every pragmatic compromise he must make.

Living here in rural America where everyone totes a gun and for the most part are suspicious of any new ideas (gays, blacks, taxes), I am so aware of class differences. I am aware that rigorous thinking is foreign to our neighbors - and to many of my countrymen. Is there anyone out there over sixty-five who does not appreciate Medicare or Social Security?? Come on! This is government run! We pay our taxes for this stuff! And we love it! Don't you know this?

And here is where the media, mostly the right, comes in. They whip up folks to say they won't have choice in health care, they'll be thrown out of the system. Have they investigated this? No! They just listen to the ads that are backed by the big pharmaceutical and medical companies who in the end just want a huge profit in their pockets.

What disgusts me is our Congress that has to pander to these large companies. A senator cannot vote for Sotomayor because of the gun lobby etc. With very few exceptions I think our legislators have been bought by special interests.

We have a bipartisan form of government, a wonder in the world. I respect the differences in philosophy and want this to continue. But I am cynical in my old age. We have lost our way in the homage to Big Money and Power. We have seen this as America caused the global recession.

I voted for Change. And now I see the cracks. My night time heebie jeebies are about racism.. The talk shows discuss whether Obama is truly an American. I have such distrust for these guys who are actually making a ton of money whipping up the emotions of people who do not think any where near rigorously. They talk about elitism. This, of course, hits a nerve. (Fear, envy?)

How could any rigorously thinking person believe that Sarah Palin could run this country?

Is our destiny to understand everything in 140 characters? I think we are better than that.

Shark Attack!

Last week, a young friend of mine, an old student and the daughter of a good friend was savagely attacked by a shark. She had just returned home from a summer job at her college and was relaxing and swimming with her sister from a raft just beyond her family's dock in Boca Ciega Bay. It seems that the two of them, Jenna and her big sister Laura, were dangling their legs off the raft, when suddenly what must have been a large bull shark attacked Jenna's leg. She screamed and Laura somehow managed to drag her onto the raft and then onto the dock and apply pressure to staunch the copiously bleeding wounds, called 911 and the neighbors, and calmed her little sister on the way to the hospital.

It looked quite grim when I heard about it a few hours later. Would she lose her leg? Did she need blood? What about Laura? How must she feel? I went to bed and dreamed about sharks. As the days passed I heard constant updates on Jenna's progress. More than six hundred stitches up her entire leg, and almost a week in the hospital, but we know now, she'll be fine, and can even go back to college in a month. For all her life she'll have that thin scar line from ankle to thigh. And what a tale she'll have to tell her children and grandchildren.

This affected me so much on many levels. First, this family has always seemed so golden to me; nothing bad could ever happen to them. I have taught all three siblings and they were among my favorite students. The connection to each other this family had and has is extraordinary. I love this family! They have always cared so much about each other, seeing each child as an individual, but they were never 'helicopter' parents and let their kids follow their stars. So all three kids went far away to college. These parents truly gave their kids wings to fly.

And next, how can we as parents ever protect our children from the unexpected? What horror it must be to have your college student gunned down by a maniac? Or the always dreaded automobile accident? Or.. a shark attack?

When my own kids, who have fledged now, come back to visit, I am incredibly thankful to have them here. Count them; one, two, three. You've let them go, but that incredible parental love is always anxious. We still love to have them HERE, under our roof. But we know we can't control a thing.

So, this picture is of quilt I made this week, commemorating the shark attack. I will give it to this family and I hope they will leave it around their house for the kids to wrap up in, and maybe remember this amazing experience in which everyone - the sisters, the brother, Mom and Dad, many friends-showed the love of an amazing family.

The Girl Posse

Every summer for many years now, these girls have come to visit me at my ranch. I think of them as "the posse" though the four of them are quite distinct. When they were twelve years old or so they wanted to revisit the ranch where they had had such a wonderful time on the annual school field trip their class made to the ranch each year. As they dispersed from elementary school to various middle schools and high schools they maintained their strong loyalty to each other- and to me!

The summer visit became a tradition. They slept upstairs with each other like litter mates, spewing their belongings all over the house, getting to know where everything was. They ate everything in sight, learned to cook with my husband, swam in the pool, and each night we played cards or scrabble games. We read and discussed books and made art and crafts and roamed the property by day and night.

Now they have just finished their first year of college. I see these beautiful young women who have emerged from being spotty and lumpy and unsure of themselves. They are fledgelings, young adults now, all glowing with that exquisite newness. This was the first year that I gave them the choice of staying in the guest house. Of course, they took it. I did not tell them how to manage that.

We had to do the traditional things. They ran around the property in the golf cart, they played cards with us, and they worked in my studio. We talked books and when several of our neighbors came for dinner one night they participated in our political talk and helped in the preparation of a dinner for ten. Over the three days they were here I felt comfortable letting them figure out what to do most of the time. They knew they could find me during work hours in my studio.

Teenagers have such a different time schedule! We've been up for three hours before an yone appears. It lets us have time to read the papers. And they have no interest in current events it seems. No one will rumple up the New York Times or scuffle through the Wall Street Journal.

Most of all, I listen to them. I observe them. These are children of the last generation before 9/11. They grew up being unafraid. They know this. I see these four beautiful and brilliant girls as beginning to be competent. They already know that they can be good students and they are open to figuring out what they can do, what they really want to do.

I wanted to ask them so many things! But I hold back. They'll tell me in good time. For now, I just think that it is enough that they want to come each year to reaffirm our friendship.

I am almost old enough to be the grandmother to these kids. I hope to see them with their own children ( if they want them) and with clear paths to an interesting and fulfilling life.

What I did not have the opening to tell them was that they should pay attention to their own parents, ask them what's on their minds, how they are. It's never too early to regard one's parents as people who have their good and bad issues. So often it takes such a long time for kids to be able to regard their parents as real people, not just people who are reliably there for them.

I am honored that the 'Posse' comes here. I love those girls!

Puerto Rico Wedding

Here is the groom looking under his wife's skirt (Is there anything there that is new??) It was a traditional wedding with the twist of Puerto Rico. Our family went down for five days to celebrate this union of my nephew Dan and his wife, Inia. We rented a lovely house in Rincon and twelve of us stayed there, lots of family, loving the beach and the pool and the coral reef out front. We hung out on the front balcony, ironed our wedding clothes, and were the hottest and sweatiest any of us could remember.

I love weddings! They are all the same, but with small differences. I want to tell all the brides and grooms that they should be loving and inviting to each other, not just for now, but over the long haul. Most of all, they need to be interesting to each other and for the whole marriage find topics to discuss.

There were funny things and lovely things happening. My four grandsons were stellar, so handsome and loving and fun! At the wedding we all danced. We all swam in the pool and explored tide pools and snorkeled on the reef. We discovered hundreds of terrestrial hermit crabs and huge green iguanas clinging to the trees.

All we ate were beans, pork, and rice, mostly. In Puerto Rico people don't eat many vegetables, but the fruits- bananas, mangoes etc- are wonderful.

Five days and we were ready to return. I am hungry for vegetables!

Obama doesn't walk on water

But he's trying to make good on his vision for a country with a decent economy, full employment, universal health care, and the strength to go forward with what is needed for global attention to climate change. A lot on his plate. He's got to be pragmatic but I'd love to see him in passing gear.

I watch on t.v. and read many papers each day. We have such a destructive legacy of partisanship. Mostly by the old white guys. I think that most of the people in our congress are TOO OLD! They have been 'carefully taught' in the words of the old song from "South Pacific". So much of what they say seems so knee jerk. They call it wisdom. (If Obama selected a nominee for the Supreme Court, she must be bad for the Republicans, or good for the Democrats.)

These days, as an "old" person, quite idiosyncratic and prone to pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes on, I am, first of all, thankful that I do not have to watch everything I say because of the partisan and media sharks out there. But I do wonder as I watch these senators and congressmen and pundits on t.v. - Could they ever be really honest?? Are they always covering their backsides for political reasons??

For example: Why didn't anyone clearly say the obvious long ago that Sarah Palin was really quite stupid, and certainly not up to the notion of being a heartbeat away from the presidency? Why is the Congress so intransigent about what needs to be done about Global Warming? Doesn't anyone really pay attention to how we can address our energy needs? We are pandering to Big Pharma and private health insurance, Big Energy. You can be assured that most members of congress and the senate are feathering their own political nests. (These guys are WAY too old to remember they might have dealt with a pregnant daughter with choices to make or a drop-out kid, or, or..)

Younger people, new people, of all colors and stripes might be able to look at each issue without the old white baggage of partisanship. You young people need to stop rolling on your backs in surrender. Get up there and bark for what's needed.

This is an amazing country! We have the chance to reset and I am hoping against hope that the young will latch on.

My Birthday

I would post a new photo but it takes a LOT of time to haul the photo from the archives these days; the flip side of living so far out in paradise is that the satellite is so slow.

But, here I am, still strong and now 69. Time to take stock. In so many ways I am still the person I was at 10. And in so many ways I have accrued the barnacles of age. I can now begin to understand how I am perceived by others- and it takes a lot of living to understand this. I am not an easy person, not an easy friend though I did not see this for most of my life. I am crabby, judgmental, high energy, extremely efficient and organized. Sometimes I scare people with my sharp questions.

I do see myself as a generous and curious person, mostly competent. I am always feeling that I could do better, do more, produce more.. Who doesn't?

On my birthday I bask in the arrivals of weird cards and calls and gifts. I loved the birthday night of my family and friends making crepes suzettes for me and singing the birthday song as the brandy burned off. I loved the gift my husband gave me of a lovely wood bench that allows me to get high enough to work on my wall of fabrics. I loved the gift my daughter gave me of her time to work on the technology of my phone. I loved the used and irreverent Sara Palin tee shirt from my son and the cards from my preliterate grandchildren. I loved the candle holder from my sister, who knew I coveted hers. I loved the call from my friend Jeff who offered to come here and work on my computer issues. I loved the visit from my brother and his wife. I loved the visit and hug from my neighbor, Warren. (Who said, "Are you sixty yet?") I loved the calls from young people who still want to connect with me.

I love and hate being this age. I hate the wrinkles above my knees and elsewhere. I am no longer at that invisible part of life that is middle age. Now! I am an old lady and I find it lovely to be respected for that. Idiosyncracy lives!







Another birthday and I am totally happy