Taking Stock

Today we said our good byes to the last guests (and the porta potty) who were here for what we thought of as "the Big Bash" of our fiftieth wedding anniversary. Our three children really wanted this. Initially we thought that this anniversary would be perfectly fine if the primary players just had a really nice dinner together. But this celebration took on a life of its own and we all got interested in having it happen. Our daughter and two sons and all their kids and all our relatives came and we had many out of town folks staying in the local motels and here at the ranch; every bed was warmed.

It was a really great gathering of all the people we love, old and new. Of course there were aspects of the event that I would have changed. The band was too loud and the guy who manned the photo booth was such a snark. And there were too many weeds in the flower beds, and too many armadillos digging holes in the lawn. I didn't get to talk to enough of those wonderful friends. But still, it was amazingly great, way better than the frugal backyard wedding we had those fifty years ago when we were just kids, recently turned twenty.

So here we are, the mainstays of an enormous family. How did that happen? We have been prosperous and generous over the years and we enjoy the tumbling of love we have from our children and grandchildren and all the other kids who have been in our lives. We have had just as much sadness and disaster as the next couple. And we have been lucky! No skeletons in our closet, but an intense interest in each other and in the other world. We have been able to change with the times, and we were fortunately oblivious of some of the issues that others in our generation struggled with.

Our family loves to celebrate! The night before the Big Bash we had an incredible Puerto Rican dinner ending with an exploding volcano cake in honor of the birthdays of two grandsons. (My signature offering!) Those puffs of steam from the center of the cake and the red lava flow were so awesome. Those little boys had wide eyes. I am the fun Grandma for sure.

I am so weary. I am thinking of how much I loved having my three children together, talking their heads off, loving each other, plotting for the next time they'll meet. At my age I can now sit back and enjoy them, not even feeling I have to know everything about them.

Yesterday, we saw an eagle on our place. And just after that I found a newborn calf all alone. We rescued him, reunited him with his mother, and today he is well, not fodder for vultures. This evening we had collards out of our garden for supper.

Could life be better than this?

Time to regroup

I spent the afternoon at a second grade at Lacoochee Elementary School where I returned the twice fired and glazed lumps of clay the kids had lovingly made. They were excited to see how shiny and wonderful their pieces now were. This was their first foray into ceramics. The kids who settled down and actually produced things and carefully glazed them had many finished pieces. The kids who weren't there or had been yanked out to do special tutoring, or just couldn't get down to the task, had little to show for it. Natural consequences.

Each week we have been studying insects, capturing them, looking at them. When I get there to the class they always have something interesting to tell me or show me. Today it was a praying mantis eating a small grasshopper. "Gross!" This is a lively class of about sixteen kids, very doable. Sky, the tiny seven year old has captured a dead rhinoceros beetle. She can identify it and is pleased about this.

We play several rounds of Hangman and I am appalled at the lack of word skills these kids have! Maybe this is partly because I have always taught somewhat older kids, but shouldn't second graders at least know that every word has a vowel? (Forget rhythm) And consonants? I give the kids hints, discuss vowels and consonants. So we go on. Next guess? "Z", says Miguel. I explain that if you see an NG at the end of the word, it's a good bet that you need an I before to make ing.

After a while I see that four of the kids are actually focusing and can make pretty good guesses. One kid, Xavier, has a pretty good overview and tries and succeeds in predicting the word from the clues. In this activity every child was on task and interested.

I often browse around this classroom and see the lovely and unconscionably expensive reading materials from FCAT. The words and directives these things use are of no interest and use to non readers such as these kids. I also see magically interesting big drawings on paper their teacher has them do for literacy and math. These things and the attention to the bugs in the science are what grabs these children.

The rest of this post, the political part was stolen by Hughes Internet.

Kids!

Nothing makes me happier than knowing my favorite youngest grandson, five years old, is sleeping upstairs. We read four chapters of "My Father's Dragon" and giggled about the wonderful images and then discussed plans for tomorrow. We will have a breakfast of french toast with maple syrup, made by Grandpa, then we'll go to a garden gig, and we'll have plenty of time for him to grind up various things in the old fashioned coffee grinder he's found somewhere in our house. I'm thinking we should try acorns. Kisses and suddenly he's asleep, cuddled up under the quilt, his red hair peeping out from the covers.

My head is full of children. I am so looking forward to next weekend when all my children and grandchildren come to celebrate our fiftieth anniversary. But day in and day out my children are the ones I know from volunteering in a local public school. Now in October I can easily identify each child by the shape of their hands, and the whorls of their dark hair. Jesus and Xavier and Abigail and all the others are becoming so dear to me as they become better and better at observing the natural world we explore each week. I come into their class and they excitedly show me the insects they have collected, how their books are coming along. This is such a joy to me. Their parents work in the school garden and are harvesting many peppers and planting a new fall garden.

This week I have been involved in the politics of public school. To our dismay, our Lacoochee principal was summarily removed, and at the end of the second week we have heard nothing! Parents and community members organized to write petitions and send messages to the school board, demonstrate daily. Attending the first ad hoc meeting of people of all ages, colors, walks of life just blew my mind! This principal, Karen Marler, has been a leader of the community action to renew this small and impoverished community. She is a beloved principal and knows every child and their family histories, and is plugged into state and national sources of help. She is a steel magnolia and brooks no fools. What she cares about most is her kids at the school. We want her back!

Rumors and tid bits of information are all we have at present. Reading the comments to the blog from the St. Pete Times reporter, I am thinking that the person bringing the grievance is an evangelical religious nutcase. But none of us knows anything.

Been a pretty interesting week. Today was REALLY the first day of fall as we Floridians know. Everyone is energized by the cooler weather and lower humidity and somehow everything seems possible. Maybe those tomatoes will produce before frost. Maybe we can even manage to elect some folks who are ethical and pass some initiatives that will help our society. Maybe, in the next few months, I can get a reliable internet connection. Sally Sunshine speaking.

News from the Green Swamp

I have been in a funk for the last couple of days since I heard that our beloved Lacoochee Elementary School principal, Karen Marler, was summarily jerked from her post. Officially the superintendent of schools here in Pasco County, Heather Fiorentino, says nothing. The official word is that Karen will be gone for a short time.

When I went to the school today, the mood was black bunting, though no one can say, no one knows Lips are sealed.Certainly not Sunshine! Felt more like a Chinese scene to me.

Of course we all speculate about what has happened and we think of possible causes for this sudden recall. Political? Karen is an independent thinker, her bottom line is the kids and the community that is pulling itself up by the bootstraps. She has been out in front in the energy required to get it happening. She has also been a vocal critic of the relentless FCATs, though on her watch the school consistently made good grades - until this year when the school rating plummeted from an A to a C. Some teachers tell me that the reason for this is an influx of non English speakers.

Whatever, no one ever examines what, if anything, this means.

I am profoundly unhappy with all this. Here is one of America's extremely poor communities and the real leader is the elementary school principal who truly cares about the kids and their families. Amazingly, Karen and many other community citizens have begun to fashion a renaissance. This has attracted state and national attention!

I know nothing about what happened this week. In this case I cannot imagine that there were the usual anomalous sins people get caught up in.

But, despite the general depression in the school today, I had a wonderful time with "my second grade group". After several weeks of examining insects and spiders, the kids really know how to observe. The classroom bristles with cages , of dead and live bugs, shoe boxes punched with holes, and full of grasshoppers and katydids.

We went on an official treasure hunt in the woods behind the school, looking for critters, and almost every team came up with every item. They know the parts of insects. (Ms. Molly, how you spell abdomenthorax?)

We passed the parents who are working on the community garden and the kids asked if they have seen any caterpillars?

And then, as we were making our books about the stuff we had collected, one kid announced that there were apples in the boys' bathroom toilet.

An uproar, of course. Seven year olds do not have front teeth! Silly me. They do not want me to think ill of them, so throw it down the john.. So, we can use the net we have for butterfly catching, and viola! no apples in the john.

I love those kids and their wonderful teacher. Something in me will curl up in a frizzle if that amazing principal is ground into dust by the "system".

My sister, the Pilgrim

My youngest sister took off a couple of months from life this summer to walk the Santiago Pilgrimage trail across northern Spain. It was a life dream. She went with her daughter, Grace, who is a student at Evergreen College, and who got credit for her experience! Tomorrow, she'll be heading back to her life as a tile artist in the northwest. And Grace will be heading off to adventures in Egypt!

When she gets home she will, no doubt, be punished for doing this amazing and selfish thing. It's part of the territory for those of us who take off from time to time.

I have been so interested in their travels as I have heard from emails along the way. Irene is soon to be sixty three, a master swimmer and up for anything. What an adventure!

My littlest sister has done an awesome thing and her grandchildren will love the tales about it. I have had a teeniest bit of envy I won't deny. But I have had many adventures as well, and I am not at all sure I could have walked 800 miles in two months as they did. I loved hearing the answers to my questions about the trail, the people she met, the conditions, the food .. The religious part of it is hard for me to understand, but the artistic part is so real.

Just think about this. Irene, a tiny, fit woman, walks all this distance wearing a handmade dress every day that has emblazoned on it a large virgin Mary on the front and on the back. Early on in the trek she shaved her head in front and made dreadlocks in back. And so, she was known along the trail.

I salute this! I think of the treks I made with my best friend through the Amazon forests at night, pawing through the vines, looking for snakes,dressed in jungle gear,(not thinking about hair-dos) and never encountering so much as a smidgen of Catholicism. We were pikers!

All these two months Irene has been on her pilgrimage, I have followed her progress on my map. I dream about her, I think about where she is now, she is in my thoughts. I know she has put one foot in front of the other for so many miles it must have put her soul at ease.

I am hoping that Irene will make a tile composite about the pilgrimage.

Back here in the Green Swamp we are preparing for the party of a lifetime and Irene will be there! I shall make time to hear in detail about the pilgrimage.

Not to be too smug, but everyone ought to have sisters. My two are so amazing in their special ways.

Alone at the edge of the Green Swamp

I tried to write a few minutes ago and the internet crashed due to a rain squall. The flip side of paradise.
There was a barred owl on the fencepost, quietly watching for the mice and rabbits scurrying around the yard. It is gently raining and I think of the vegetables I planted in the last few days, now drinking in the rain water that is so much better than anything we mortals can provide.
I love being here so far away from anything commercial, plastic or noisy. I do hear the trains in the distance when the vapors are right, and sometimes planes overhead.
In the suburban and urban places I have lived I loved the sound of church bells in the morning and the clinks and clanks of people getting up and moving here and there and tending to their lives.
But I love this more! I love the silence which isn't silence at all. I listen to the thousands of frogs calling at night from the ponds and the swamp. I hear the deer with their sharp whistles, the bark of the fox, the whir of the hummingbirds, the funny snorts of the wild pigs and the grunts of the armadillos. In the barn there is the tinny music of the mud daubers arguing in their shoots they have attached to the siding. I love hearing the turkeys emerging from their night roosts, and the ibis squawking in the dawn.
This is so much better than hearing the "Four Square" garbage truck that trundled its way through our suburban street.
I love the darkness at night. Depending on the phase of the moon it is sometimes so bright I can walk for miles without a flashlight. Other nights when there is cloud cover I don't even have to close my eyes for total darkness. When I turn on my flashlight I sometimes see banks of bright cow eyes low to the ground.
Though I love to be here in the Green Swamp, I do have to get my urban "fixes" from time to time so we travel every year, sometimes just to New York for a weekend, and sometimes to somewhere more ambitious such as Asia or Europe, maybe this next time to Australia.
I couldn't live here without the internet and phone, my lifeline to friends. But I am mostly accepting that these links often do go down and then I just go out and listen to the frogs and take a deep breath, so happy to be here.

Whatever happened to facts?

It alarms me that people pay no attention to facts right now. Politically, people have made up their minds with no regard to facts! Is this because that they think that facts are fluid and schmoozy, no need to pay attention to them? Just, whatever..
Maybe it is because facts are second to the feelings about life as it is lived right now. Lots of folks can't stand people of another color or ethnicity or religion because in these times they are scared. They want to have theirs. To me this seems mean spirited.
I am trying to understand. I know that Glen Beck and his ilk are saying that we need to renew our values as Americans. I would certainly agree with that, but I cannot help knowing that what he is really thinking and promoting is the message of fear and racism. And this always resonates with the disaffected. Bowing to the crazy bloggers who keep saying that Obama is a Muslim, not an American Citizen is just nuts!

These events are always couched in piety (god), but I wonder how many of the folks there at the Beck event, are truly invested in the message that all religions promote-that the almighty cares for all humans and wants good will for al
Sorry, but I continue to think that organized religion is detrimental to the good will that can happen with us humans. I believe in the soaring spirit of Americans and I devoutly hope we really can get back on track as the inclusive

Anniversary

This week we celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary, and also the birthday of our eldest child, born exactly five years later. We are looking forward to having a huge bash of a party, what our frugal wedding wasn't, and we wanted to wait until the weather was cooler than this mid August soup that passes for summer here.

We shall have good food, dancing and music and other fun stuff. No one will have to obsess about what to wear and they will bring nothing but themselves. Guests will not have to look up a special website with directives about what to order for gifts. There will be no expensive flowers, just what the meadows have on tap. And there will be no ceremony, just good fellowship among the folks who have supported us over the years. I will NOT be wearing my old wedding dress (that, in fact, was long lost to a dramatic performance of ten year olds.)

Our three children have sparked this event. At first when it was presented as an idea, we recoiled in horror. (Oh, pshaw, all we're going to do is give each other new gardening tools. Not a big deal.)

So now I am definitely up for this celebratory event. Much less expensive than a wedding and a lot more than a sure thing. Much less stress for all..

I have loved this husband of mine for fifty years, in sickness and health, for better or for worse, we are in it for the long haul, so why not celebrate?

Life in the Slow Lane

Many times a day I am frustrated by the internet access we have here in the boondocks. We have satellite, our only option, and daily the bandwidth slims down. So we can do business in the mid morning, and then it is iffy the rest of the day into the evening. If I wait to download a photo, mostly everything goes up to god or wherever and never returns.

A couple of evenings ago when I really wanted to connect on my blog, and the internet was down, I wrote to our president, basically asking if we rural folks were chopped liver and did not deserve to have access to the world out there. We are too far from a cell phone tower to connect on any reliable basis.

Anyway, this is the flip side of paradise, and I am trying to be more tolerant. The vegetable garden is being prepared for the fall planting. It is so hot I can only work for a couple of hours between seven and nine a.m. We have removed the weeds of summer and put down the old funky jute mats no longer presentable on our porches. These are great mulch and weed suppressors and we just cover them with mulch. Then when it is time to plant, we cut holes and apply some of the wonderful compost that has been percolating all summer, and stick in the seeds or seedlings I have been cultivating in coir containers. It is all potential!

Speaking of potential, our garage apartment in St. Pete is progressing. The demolition is awesome! Now I can get a faint glimmer of what this small place (not quite 1100 sq. ft.) will be. I rescued an old claw foot bathtub from the previous apartment and as it sat by the dumpster, lots of people came by wanting it. No way! This is going to be a planter for salad greens.

It's a wonderful life here. So much to share.

Being Connected

Another fraud?

Today I volunteered at my local public school, helping a young teacher set up her second grade classroom. Basically, she had everything in mind and just needed a pair of hands to move shelves and cabinets where she wanted.

But there were enormous amounts of slick thin books, many FCAT materials, empty binders, and kits from various text book publishers, and she had no interest in them, though she told me that they might be full of interesting little things. She has reams of the same kind of stuff, now updated and fine in new plastic.

All this STUFF is overwhelming! Most of it is from the text book publishers, and now out of date. There is little in the way of inviting art materials, no aquarium waiting for a gerbil or some fish, no blocks or Legos.

We placed the current reading materials in the teacher shelf and sorted through the books, filling three boxes with books she didn't want and will give away to the kids (which is probably the best pedagogical thing she can do this year!) The rest of the books we placed in attractive bins for the kids to grab and read. She has a vision of a reading corner here with pillows and an area rug. I have promised some brightly covered pillows.

We are in most states so strapped for money we are laying off teachers and hunkering down THEY SAY. But I cannot help thinking that there is some kind of fraud going on here, not unlike in the medical world, not unlike in the insurance world. Someone is selling all that excess educational stuff: Houghton Mifflen, Harcourt Brace, etc. I think that the textbook companies are feathering their nests, people are being paid off to unload all this unnecessary stuff to school systems that don't need it! And, basically. they can't afford it.

Why in the world, for example, would a school system pay $50 for a classroom 'calendar kit' when a teacher could easily make a classroom calendar on his own? Why would a very poor school have an entire store room filled with math gadgets that few teachers need or know the purpose of?

I think that we could save millions of dollars by looking into the amazing largess of the suppliers of school supplies. Someone is being paid off to provide this stuff! Just look at how the purveyors of the FCAT test results fell short! The actual teachers and principals have little or no say in what they get in the way of supplies and textbooks.

School supplies and books need to be lean. Kids love to go the library and select books and they treasure that special 'one' book they can take home at night. Teachers and kids can make almost everything they need in the classroom. Anything is more important and treasured if you make it yourself!

I imagine the time when our wonderful public school teachers and principals can be more autonomous and call the shots, unfettered by the greedy textbook companies that now dictate even when they can take a breath.

Wouldn't it be great if every school was just issued the funds from the state and could do with it what they wanted? I guarantee that we'd see a lot of creative uses of the money, and there wouldn't be the vast excess that no one wants or needs. (And maybe the powers that be at the textbook companies would not be flying around on corporate jets.)

In the words of our man, Hooper, that's all I'm saying.

Sex and War

Dog days of Summer

We took a few days off of all electronics to make a fleeting visit to the mountains of North Carolina where we very much appreciated the cool weather and the company of old friends and the joy of being with our daughter and grandson.

The moment we returned our niece and her partner and baby arrived from Australia to stay for a week. We had been awaiting this visit since we do not see them very often, and we were so eager to hear about her life now that she has a child. In Australia, way more child friendly than the U.S., the mom takes an entire year off with full pay, and the dad takes three months off with pay. No charge for delivering the baby, and no charge for all medical things. When my niece left the hospital, she received $5000 for the child! This is "socialized" medicine! So, they pay more taxes than we do in the U.S., but not a lot more. (WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH US?) No wonder that this baby, little Seattle, is so secure and loving with his family.

But, with us, the beat goes on. Little by little, small things happen, and they pile up. My community, Dade City merging into Lacoochee and Trilby had a Day To Remember today. It was the day of Visioning when three bus loads of federal, state and local folks took a tour of the Lacoochee area and saw the needs. We had put together a proposal for the redevelopment of this area that may rival Haiti in human needs. These folks looked and took notes and then they came back to the conference room at the local power company that has been so instrumental in making this happen. They looked at a full room of hundreds, many locals (identifying themselves with their green shirts) and told us of all the money that could be ours if we could identify the needs and apply for the money that is there.

I think that eventually this could all work. An amazing photographer and gadfly, Richard Riley, has documented the landscape of Lacoochee in all its grittiness and beauty, and this has been a key factor; his photographs lined the conference room, reminding everyone of the importance of this convocation.There are so many other locals who relentlessly volunteer and make their stands.

It is really hard to think about what may work in getting the funding for this major project. We heard today that the money is there but we must identify the individual projects and make application for the grants and loans. Some of the speakers seemed to drone on to put everyone to sleep as they explained every program that could be funded. I think, who can do this?

All will be revealed! The day was an incredible affirmation of what a small segment of America can do! I imagine the day when this small town will have work for the adults, good places to live, and a healthy life for kids and everyone.

I felt so connected to mankind as I sat in the 'green shirt' section of the convocation. There was the great grandma next to me and the dad who came back for this occasion because he was born in Lacoochee and his folks still lived here. There were teachers there and retirees and parents, and just good folks of all ages and colors.

And now we have to get down to the hard work of making all these dreams happen.

Getting Ready for the Big Seven O

Next week will be my seventieth birthday, but I am still really at heart and soul a ten year old kid, but with a lot of baggage dragged along through an amazing life.

When my husband asked me what I wanted as a birthday gift I could not think of anything I do not already have that I want, so I muttered into my hand, not even thinking, "If you love me you would know." But several days later as I was on line, I heard about an amazing trip to Ruanda. I said to him, "What I would really love would be a trip to Ruanda. I could visit Paul Farmer". Deafening silence.

Of course, this is not a good idea in any way, so by the next day I had put the idea aside. I have made many outrageous and dangerous and fascinating trips to South America and the memory of them is such furniture for my mind. The idea of setting out by myself to see stuff I have only read about, maybe doing some good, is powerful to me.

On this birthday, though the years say 'OLD!', I am still vital and energetic and healthy but I don't know how much longer this will hold. I am not tethered to "meds" and I have all my parts (so far!). I am not scooting around Walmart in a wheelchair with my fat hanging down.

My youngest sister, divorced, well into her sixties, is making a two month hiking trek through Spain this summer. She's doing a trail for a saint, 800 kilometers, maybe even a hair shirt. I envy her this. But she is single and her children are grown..

My kids are also grown up. Among them we have six grandchildren for whom we have a certain amount of financial responsibility. You can't have it all! The mutual responsibility my husband and I have for each other sometimes limits our wild desires to be ten years old and free to explore anything. But we have every morning to read the papers on the porch on the edge of the swamp in this interesting and beautiful place we have made, with the loud birds and frogs calling, enveloped with wild flowers and the long shadows of early morning. And we talk our heads off about politics and everything else.. And we have the nights in our high bed with the dog! These are the rewards of a long and interesting marriage.

But it still is spice to travel yonder to swim with pink dolphins in the Amazon River or dance on top of the world in Peru, or walk for miles in Bologna. I'm not done yet!

Damn chickens!

Here is Quincy with the chickens!

Last week I took my grandson, Quincy over to my friend's place to see their chickens. He was quite delighted with it all; the chicken house that was safe from predators, the nesting boxes, the names of the hens, and most of all, the beautiful feathers he found on the ground for his "collection".

These chickens have been a source of envy to me! I have wanted to have chickens for ages. Once, years back, we had a few chickens that were given to our daughter and we had to take them back and forth between Dade City and St. Pete every weekend. Those chickens were a big drag, quite honestly, because in town they ran around our house and in my workplace, pooping everywhere with great abandon. One weekend in the country they were eaten by predators, probably a fox or a bobcat. Then, I was so frantic with everything else I had to do I had no time to concentrate on the needs of chickens, so it was a blessing, despite the tears, when they got et.

But, fast forward to the present. I love fresh eggs, and I love the physical presence of chickens with their beautiful and funny feathers and their amazing sounds. As a gardener, I know I would love having chickens eating bugs and depositing their droppings for fertilizer. I love the image of myself as a person Who Keeps Chickens. But we think of ourselves as the free spirits who come and go and it is hard enough to think about what to do with a small dog, let alone chickens. So, we are still chicken-free here on the ranch. (Cows take no particular day to day care.)

My spouse hates the idea of killing anything, especially a chicken. I tell him that we would have ALL HENS and they could provide us with the fresh eggs that are so much tastier than the ones we buy at the grocery store. We are still debating the issue.

Meanwhile, my friends who decided to keep chickens, ordered several batches of chicks and picked them up at the post office. Yes, that is how you do it. These tiny chicks were certified and promised that they would be all hens. I could hardly stand it not to go there every few days to see them growing up. And they are certainly beautiful! All glossy colors and breeds. They gave us delicious eggs when they had excess. During the day those chickens walk and strut around free and fly up into the trees and then go back into the chicken house into their little nests and lay double yolk blue eggs. Oh, how envious I have been!

Turns out that there were THREE roosters in the bunch and they were very abusive to the hens. Time for stewed chicken (roosters). So my friend's spouse said he'd do the dirty deed, leaving only one rooster. He got out the hatchet, and as the rooster rebelled, he accidentally hit his own hand with the blade. Lots of blood! He quickly bound up his hand with an old sock and carried on. My friend had the boiling water on to dunk those roosters and thus be able to pluck the feathers.

When it was all over, and the roosters plucked and in the freezer, it seemed that the injured hand needed major attention. So he went to his son, the veterinarian close by, and was stitched up in no time and bandaged with stuff dogs shouldn't chew.

I wonder if I should suggest that they go in for ostriches next? I hear that the meat is good.

Worries in the Green Swamp

A year ago I was obsessing about the resident sand hill cranes who were hatching eggs on their nest on the pond, their first clutch. Both of these two chicks died, one from unknown causes, and the other one was eaten by an alligator (in front of my eyes!) The parents, "Bob and Emily", just took off after this disaster and I thought I'd never see them again.

This year in early spring they returned, did their mating dance with much bugling and throwing of sticks. I carefully paid no attention (this is life in the wild). And then one day Bob and Emily appeared with one very cute reddish chick. All spring this family of three were to be seen in the pastures and in our yard. We named the baby Sidney. I found their nest in a different pond with no alligators and each night the family of cranes returned to their nest.

Three days ago I noticed that Bob was injured and limping! I was able to get close enough to see that his foot was intact and there did not seem to be anything broken. But he couldn't really get around very well. Emily and Sidney kept him in view at all times as he stood in the shade. When they got too far away, Bob bugled to them ("Get over here! I am still in charge!"), and they return to him.

So, I worry. Will Bob recover? Why are those buzzards hanging out in the trees overhead?

I always want to fix things. My beloved old dog ate something terrible and has been sick for two days. Seems she's better now, wanting to eat her food and greet friends.

There is always something to worry about! Of course there is the oil spill and unemployment and illegals I know and love..

But tonight there is a fullish moon and good friends to share dinner and the sides of the lane full of wildflowers. The blue curls are so elegant and tiny, and there are masses of small yellow daisies. The may pops on the fences have bloomed and are producing fruits. Iron weed is about to bloom, and our yard is full of all colors of crape myrtle. Despite the summer heat that we all complain about, this is truly the most beautiful place on earth.

The Two Habitats

I have two habitats, maybe three. The first one is my home on the edge of the Green Swamp, far away from everything. The water board folks occasionally drive through the property on their way to checking the river and tending to the vast acres on the watershed. But otherwise we live in our splendid green privacy where we shower outside in a grape arbor (and whoever goes out first in the morning must prune that shower curtain and urge the spiders to go elsewhere and flick off the green tree frogs who congregate there.) No swimsuits needed here.

We go to sleep with the cackles of the barred owls and wake up to the noise of the dawn chorus of birds. We sleep in our high bed with the dog and my quilts, nothing to wake us except the full moon shining once a month with such magic ferocity I must get up and walk around through the porches to admire it. In the moonlight I can see the cows lying peacefully in the meadow, and if I walk down to the fence I can smell their sweet breath.

But we must have our fix of urban life! Last week in midtown New York City, we strolled out to Times Square, after a wonderful restaurant dinner. Traffic has been banned there and there are lots of chairs and tables full of people (millions of people!) Above us the vast neon lights blinked and jazzed, reflected on the glass faces of the buildings. So many people! All kinds, ages. Tourists from Indiana, Muslims in full regalia, dreadlocks, very short skirts, turbans, kimonos, lots of babies in strollers, old folks, friendly policemen directing people. I can't get used to the noise! Sirens, taxis, the hum of hundreds of my countrymen having fun.

We took a long subway trip to a wedding and the whole thing was an adventure, a visual treat. Across the aisle on the train from us was a dad and his little girl, entwined in the need for sleep. I loved watching them as they kept hitching up their stuff as it fell apart. Many kisses. They were beautiful.

And then, as we exited the train, a family we had observed who was clearly on the way for a day at the beach with many kids and coolers, tumbled out of the car screaming and roiling and bursting. As we left the train, those usually uninvolved New Yorkers were stepping out from the doors, and there was clearly a bloodied woman calling for the police. It didn't happen in our car, but clearly there was some kind of assault.

The wedding took place in a park under the Brooklyn Bridge. No one could hear the words of the ceremony because of the racket from the trains crossing the bridge, but it was lovely - so New York.

We love the array of arts and music in the Big Apple and we eagerly embrace it. But at the end of the days we are exhausted from the bumping up against so many people. We are glad to get on the plane for home. I could hardly wait for the Moment when we drive down our lane between the fingers of swamp to home.

The third place we call ours is a small apartment we are renovating in the green and leafy part of Old Northeast St. Petersburg where we go sometimes to be with our family and friends. In terms of privacy, this place has the least. Neighbors are so near you could reach your hand out from your window and touch. But, unlike New York City, those neighbors seek to know you and watch out for you, and that is amazing.

Part of the price of living here is that the satellite sometimes refuses to download photos. So just imagine the contrast of the Green Swamp and Times Square.

Is technology affecting our brains?

In the last few days I have read in various newspapers (some of it on line) that 'studies show' and people think and psychologists contemplate that we spend entirely too much time in front of our digital screens large and small. It seems we are addicted!

There was the story in the NYT about children who cannot get any time from their parents because those parents were always texting or face booking or in some way or another hooked to the immediacy of their personal screens. We saw photos of families in which each member was engaged in some sort of technological interface with their chosen plasticated hardware as the family ate breakfast or dinner, each family member encapsulated in his or her own digital world.

And then there is the story today in our local newspaper about the guy in a pornography trial who was so addicted to those photos on line he could think of nothing else. What a quinella-the addiction to the computer screen and quirky sex!

I worry about this stuff. Like many people, I consider the computer a major part of my life line to the world. I connect to friends, shop, maintain political connections, connect with Facebook and utube, look up stuff, play games sometimes. When the internet is down so am I.

I have made the decision not to text or tweet, though I am tempted. Having come to age in a different and non digital world, I don't have the first instinct to call or text someone about every little thing. I grew up with regular phones and public phones when I had to go that way. I am glad for personal cell phones and actually use it as my primary phone. But it makes me absolutely crazy when the satellite that powers my computer goes down!

My five year old grandson who was trying to get on line today says to me, "This is the slowest computer I have ever seen!" Hey,this is paradise and far from anywhere! But I sympathisize. I think our brains are becoming different.

I don't know where we are going! I do not believe that the friends of mine who have decided to eschew cell phones and/or email are on the right track. I do believe that the constant texting and phoning is mostly quite silly and inconsequential, not to say dangerous when we are in our cars or in the proximity of our kids.

Today I received an actual handwritten letter from a young friend. He thanked me for my gift of time and love, and it was lovely. We forget in this digital age that personal attention is best. We all want to spit on the signatures to find out if what we receive is not ersatz.

What do you think?

Moving Days

When insomniac during the period of selling our old house, working on selling our daughter's house, putting in a bid on this one and generally trying to make the ham and eggs come out even, I counted the number of moves we have made over the years- fifteen!

So, we are going to try the grand experiment of living in a family compound. What you see here is the main house where our daughter and her family will live. In back there is a funky three car garage with an apartment above it. That's ours!

The main house is lovely, a restored 1925 bungalow updated with a great kitchen, new energy efficient everythings, hardly any yard to take care of, and in an old fashioned neighborhood with neighbors who pop in to bring welcomes. (and tell all about the past owner.)

The so-called carriage house aka the funky garage is all potential. The contractors will begin in a couple of weeks to make it into a comfortable and even stylish two floor abode for us when we come to town a couple of days a week. I am certainly on board for all the actual facts of moving. We spent a day unpacking the kitchen stuff, horsing around and setting up furniture, taking everything out of the POD, breaking down boxes, and trying to find stuff.

The dogs were particularly irritating as they whined around being insecure and getting underfoot. Quincy, who's five, was delighted with it all and very excited to find that his beloved stuffed animals made it through a couple of months in the POD. He explained to me that Goldie, the stuffed goldfish had been o.k. because there was lots of fish food in the POD, but she was happy to get out. I can hardly think about the day when our own storage unit will appear. Surely no roach, let alone a stuffed fish would make it!

I am o.k. with the actual moving and I can imagine the process of gutting the garage and putting in a living space for us. Basically, I think this idea is a good one. I think of days when
Quincy will pop over for breakfast or we'll all eat dinner together on the future patio. I imagine my daughter and me walking our dogs down to the waterfront in the cool of the evening..

But for me, home is here on the edge of the Green Swamp. I fell in love with this place twenty years ago. It's terribly inconvenient, like having a lover in Argentina. Though I had the best work anyone could have, I craved those weekends, even before we built the house and all the other structures and we camped out with the bugs. I love the land and the space and the gardens and the privacy and the possibilities of the natural world. And now that I really live here, I can expand my horizon to include the local community and new friends and commitments. What could be more perfect than the long hours I spend making quilts and pots and paintings? Or walking up to the main house in the evening where my husband is finishing the dinner for us? Or having friends visit and we sit on the porch watching the birds?

We will have our own place in town and it fills me with the greatest pleasure and gratitude that our daughter truly wants us there and that we will go there and know that in that big house across the yard are people we dearly love. And I also know that as the years go by and we cannot manage our country lives, our small city place will be just right. Not yet, though.

I'm Back!

Here's Dylan with his sculpture made from the huge quantities of squash I brought from my garden into Lacoochee School on my last day of volunteering this year. It was a very fun day and the creations were awesome. We ate prodigious amounts of local watermelon, distributed their cookbooks from our year of cooking, and finished the day with the last chapter of "Little House on the Prairie". I have loved my 'adopted' classroom. I know I will see these kids next year, and maybe some of them over the summer at my 'camp' here at the ranch. I love these kids.

While my internet connection was down for several weeks I have been seeing the vegetable garden through to the harvest. The lettuce was the first to be fried by our early summer heat. But the cucumbers have loved this hot and rainy time. We have maybe twenty cukes each day, and even the tomatoes are coming along. We had to repair the fence that fell down under the weight of all those heavy squash. Even in this hot weather there is always something to eat.

This morning very early we began digging a channel for the new cable from the satellite. It is about five hundred feet from my studio to the main house, and lots of roots along the way! Now, all is completed, our backs are tired and we will sleep well tonight.

Here is a typical evening's harvest. I feel like a wonderful purveyor to the cook! "Here's what there is today. What will you do with it?" Andy, the cook, makes very interesting dishes with what I bring.

During this time of a few weeks, actually two months, all we can think about is the oil leaking into the Gulf. None of us have ever considered oil rigs. They were just out there (Drill, baby, drill) and I have never supported having those rigs anywhere near. But now I scour the photos and the streaming videos, trying to understand what is happening.

I think this is a disaster of enormous proportion to us all. I think of the children's book 'Motel of the Mysteries' in which in the far future some anthropologists have unearthed a civilization that was buried in paperwork. Will our current society be buried and left for dust by the unintended consequences of technology? There is so much stuff happening in technology! Who of us could have known that the drilling for oil would bring such disaster?

And who of us could have known how greed has insinuated itself into every part of our lives? I have watched the Florida politicians of late hang themselves on matters of ethics. The only candidate (so far!) I can support is Alex Sink for governor -smart, capable, and squeaky clean ethically. I was impressed at first with Charlie Crist as he became independent, but right now he looks like a lightweight, ethically speaking. Surely he had to know about those cronies close to him. And if he did not, as he said, he's not that bright.

Aargh! Seems just right to us to live here on the edge of the Green Swamp where nights are dark and stars are bright, where bobcats and alligators cross the road and swallow tail kites fly in the sky and little kids can collect ant lions in the sand.

Cinco de Mayo and tomato hornworms

First, I have to vent about the lack of internet access if one happens to be a persopn living in rural America! Our only option is a satellite, that works only fitfully. So, again no photos because I am writing on a miserable net book without that big hard drive full of photos.

The Cinco de Mayo celebration in the fourth grade at Lacoochee Elementary was spectacular! I lugged in about a ton of stuff (with help from the kids): picadillo, tortillas, rice, fixings for guacamole, pineapple and giant grapes, and flan! I didn't know how much help I would have, but muchas senoras showed up with cooked beans they smashed and cooked again for refried beans. My favorite teacher, Rachel, brought in lots of sour cream, cheese, and the best corn tortillas made by her mother-in-law. One of the volunteer senoras brought in hand made decorations and I had my cd player belting out Celia Cruz. The kids were very interested in a huge and extremely heavy mortar and pestle one mom brought in to use to make the guacamole.

The making of the fiesta and the eating of the comida took a couple of hours and lots of other teachers came by to join in the fun. Afterwards when we had cleaned up everything in the multipurpose room, we went outside to do the pinata thing.

Rachel's husband is a teacher in this school too, and he is always into eating any of the stuff we make, so this day, after pronouncing the picadillo very good, I asked him to find a place to hang up the pinata I had filled with candy (I had considered filling it with politically correct and educational trinkets, but none of them would fit into the small orifice, so I went with candy.)

We all trooped out to the playground and fixed the hot pepper pinata to monkey bars with stout twine. These Mexican kids knew exactly what to do, they had done it many times before. There is a special chant, some rules (all new to me). So these kids were out oin the hot sun whacking away at a giant red cardboard jalapeno pepper. Eventually the thing just died of exhaustion and broke open. The kids all jumped on it in a clot more violent than anything in NFL.

It was the best. So satisfying to all, dangerous, potentially hurtful.

I loved this zany celebration and how kids and adults just hung out together and had fun all afternoon. I love this school that has the confidence and expansiveness to embrace this kind of joy. I especially loved being welcomed by these Mexicans who put up with my newly minted Spanish.

As I gathered together all the remains of the grand feast parents I didn't even know who were waiting for their kids sprang up to help us trundle everything out to my car. And several parents who are working on our school garden hurried up to tell me what was happening in all those containers. The corn! The beans! The peppers!

With my car chuck full of dirty pots and dishes I pulled out of the parking lot as six women colorfully clad in bright yellow traditional Mexican dresses were massing outside the auditorium. I just had to stop my car and leap out to give each of them a hug. I know some of them as the moms of kids I know. Others are the gardeners.

Speaking of which, I discovered a tomato horn worm on my best tomato plant approximately the size of a wiener dog. I cut it in six pieces with my garden scissors. I am spraying with BT, all an organic gardener can do. And I trapped an armadillo last night. The pests are here! Went to Lowes today and bought netting to cover the plants from squirrels and birds. Tomorrow morning when it's cool I plan to put down weed cover to quell the immense amount of dollar weed sprouting on all the garden paths.

I am here alone for a couple of days, not a bad thing. I love the solitude and privacy, the dawn chorus of birds, the hummingbirds busy in the honeysuckle, the crane family stalking around, proud of junior who is losing his red color and starting to get a bustle. I love working in the vegetable garden before it gets hot. It's similar to doing a jig saw puzzle because you just think about what you are doing now. Oh, yes, I thought this weed would never come back. Should I leave this morning glory? What about the volunteer zinnias? Yes, the butterflies love them. Oh, here is a lovely brown toad. And before you know it, the sun is getting high in the sky and I am dripping with sweat.

Blazing hot!

I vowed that I would never complain again about hot weather, but I am recanting. Zip! On the first of May, it became mid August with temperatures above ninety. So we cranked up the A/C a month early.

The vegetable garden that faired poorly in the cold spring is not that adaptable. It was the year that we had at least six big pickings of English peas, but in this heat wave, the squash overwhelmed them, glad to be able to reach out tentrils to something already there. The red pontiac potatoes are doing very well and we eat them daily. I love those little babies, so sweet and crunchy and fun to find by digging my fingers into the dirt where there are so many earthworms now. Collards are spectacular and I have covered with netting the tomato plants that are attractive to the birds and squirrels. This year I put out the tomatoes early and planted them in large containers. What a difference that made! No nematodes, and so far no tomato horn worms. We are already picking cherry tomatoes.

I have covered the salad tables with left over screening so we are still harvesting lettuces. Cucumbers are coming on.

I have never seen such an infestation of dollar weed! I heavily mulch the actual vegetables with hay, but the paths between are verdant with the beautiful circles of this pervasive weed. Many self seeded zinnias are springing up and I treasure them, as do the butterflies.I heavily mulch but in a few days dollar weed is back. We replaced a jute mat on our porch and I put the old one out in the garden to smother weeds. It works very well. I need more old biodegradable mats!

The bottom line is that most of the vegetables we eat come from this family garden.

Our gentle bull, Nugene, didn't live up to his potential and he was taken away today, soon to replaced by another more horny bull. We want every cow to have a calf and Nugene didn't accomplish this.

I love these days of just this and that in this paradise of tree canopy, sounds of frogs and insects and so many songbirds. Lots of work to maintain this but it is worth it!

Can't do a blog without some thoughts about the crazy Florida politics happening. So what is wrong about taxes?? Those taxes get us what we need for a decent life style. It's called democratic government! I am glad that Charlie went independent. Just maybe he has a chance. I am voting for Meek I think, but I am for anyone who can be a spoiler for Rubio. (Are you all amazed at the bottom feeders who have also come out as candidates?)

Keep growing your own food! Stay tuned for my report on our Cinco de mayo fiesta happening at Lacoochee school.

The Process of Quilting

There are two best things about making quilts. First, there is the initial process of thinking about the person who will receive it. ( I rarely make a quilt for us.)

The second thing is just doing it.

Usually the recipient gives me some guidelines about what they want, and they never want anything classic, and they always want something really hard to do. This is my great challenge and I love to do it!

They tell me that they love dogs. So dogs it is and I scour the fabric stores and the thrift shops for images of dogs and when I have collected these I spend hours putting the collage together, and then hours appliqueing them into the final image. And of course I must invent many of the elements from my vast stash of many colored fabrics.

I apply all these elements with careful stitches onto an appropriate background, usually made from some kind of classical patchwork. All the while I am thinking of the recipient of this quilt, and this is really the best part.

I listen to music the whole time, and when I need to spin more bobbins for the sewing machine I take a break and go outside and water the lettuce or look at the moon.

I am a self taught quilter so my quilts are incredibly idiosyncratic. (The ladies in the quilt store are quite appalled!) Nothing classic about my quilting!

Here is an early photo of a landscape quilt for a dear young man who is graduating from college in a month. He didn't want dogs or anything specific so I went for images of his life as a redneck Floridian. (The back side of the quilt will be quite sedate.)

I have discovered that boys and men love quilts just as much as the women do.

After making so many quilts I have learned so much. My quilts are much stronger now and can take a lot of abuse. I know that young people don't wash stuff very often so I give them colors and constructions that can stand up for a long time.

But the bottom line is that I love to do this quilting thing for the people I love. I am happy thinking of them curled up under these basic covers, warm and enveloped and sharing my DNA ( and the dog hairs) from so many hours of work. I am happy to think of the many folks who have been facing life threatening issues who are curled up under my quilts and I love to think of the students who may be scrunched up under my quilts while they study or make love, or the babies sucking their thumbs under a fluffy quilt, and the newly weds happily hunkered down with their new responsibilities under a king sized Molly quilt.

So, back to squaring up this new quilt! Got to get the binding on, another few hours to think of my good friend who'll receive it.

Firefly magic

Just at dusk, before it is thoroughly dark these days the edge of the woods fills with a million flickering lights of the seasonal fireflies. And behind them is the harmonic resonance of the frogs, tuned together into such a magnificance of nature, who could not be awed?

Before dinner I went out to the vegetable garden with my five year old grandson and I introduced him to the bliss of eating fresh raw English peas and finding little new potatoes like treasure from underground. "Grandma Molly! Is this pod plump enough?" he asks. I show him how to tell and he stands there happily pulling off those fat pods and finding those incredibly green babies all lined up in their green row boats and ready to be eaten. We find some carrots and roll a number of pea pods into a collard leaf to take inside for dinner with the nine potatoes we dug.

We are fresh (but very tired) from hours in town where we have been pursuing our complicated real estate deal that has included selling two houses and combining our families into one new place. Our daughter has a wonderful new 1925 restored bungalow in old northeast with a carriage house on the back. It will be up to us to remodel this for us. Quite a challenge! We do not worry because our main home is here (in paradise) on the edge of the Green Swamp, not in spitting distance of anything man made. Still, it will be interesting to make something unique out of this and we don't flinch, having done this many times before.

Late this afternoon when the shadows were long and dark and grandpa was making dinner from the garden, Quincy and I drove out in the golf cart to explore the pastures. He asks me, "Why do you have two houses?" I try to explain this, giving him some simple history of our situation. I tell him that no way will we give up our ranch and that our new place in back of his new house will just be for us to come to not so often. And we want to come to his place because we love him and his mom and want to have a place to see our friends we have known for ever so long.

Five year olds keep you honest! So many questions! But Quincy knows in a deep way that this place is his. He's comfortable in the bedroom that used to be his mom's, and his tether is so long now on the place!

He knows what we do, and expects to go with me to my classroom volunteer gig at Lacoochee Elementary School on Tuesday. We are discussing the possible cooking activities!

It is not only the fireflies and the magic of being here in such a paradise. It is the getting to know a small community of local folks who really care and show up and help each other- Richard and Kathy, Virginia and Norman, the Greens, Judy, Nia and Dave, and Cpl. Hink, Kristen, and so many others who in their quiet ways really make a difference! Whatever we are, black, white, hispanic, we care in all the small communities across the land. It is so affirming and keeps me from the despair I could easily feel right now being an American.

The Spring Garden is producing!

This blog has gone a bit south because my computer access has been limited due to technical problems. However, I am trying to get going on this puny mini netbook whose connection will crash at any moment.
The spring garden (sorry, no photos yet), has been struggling because there was such an abundance of cold weather, then followed by really hot mid days. The lettuce has not been truly thriving, but we are eating broccoli, asparagus and arugula most nights. There is always something kin the garden to sustain us and our friends. I am salivating in advance of the English peas that are plumping up for a feast this next weekend. Cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, carrots, beets, beans, onions and potatoes are all potential at the moment.
Every night we are trapping armadillos, possums and raccoons outside the vegetable garden fence. We think the raccoons are the varmints who empty the bird feeders, and the armadillos are intent on breaching the fence around the vegetable garden, and if they are thwarted they just dig really deep holes in the yard so I keep the hoe handy. I renewed the flags on top of the fence to discourage the deer, so far successful.
Dollar weed has invaded the vegetable garden, no matter how deep the mulch, and each day I pull out what I have the energy for. We replaced a large jute mat we had on the porch so I took it out to the garden and plunked it down on top of the dollar weed, covered it with mulch, and so far at least that section looks pristinely free of weeds.
What I love about gardening in central Florida is that every year is different! So, this spring we haven't had any love bugs or caterpillars to notice. (yet!) But we have gnats to hate! The hummingbirds came back right on schedule, but where are the chimney swifts? The monarch butterflies are applying chrysalises to everything and the owls make noisy love all night.
The stars are bright and I look for bats in our bat house. Iwalk down to the pond to look for what's there. Maybe alligators? Certainly kingfishers and Florida ducks hunkered down for the night.
I see five deer out by the feeder, two fawns.
And now, I must tend to the voluminous watering schedule we have during the dry season.

Spring Swamp

Our beloved Green Swamp is full these few days: an abundance of water from the el nino rains, a rarity in this usually dry time. The river is flowing out of its banks and the newly green foliage is an intense light green, a joy to behold. Ibis and ducks and the occasional otter are happy. On the river today, we saw no alligators, but we know they are there. These Florida rivers running into swamp are certainly a jewel. The high water has flushed out an amazing amount of trash and we saw some styrofoam cups and even an occasional cooler thrown out by careless boaters.

Tonight, I hear the deep harmonic resonance of a million frogs croaking in the dark. On top of that are the sounds of the nocturnal insects.

We had a few young people visiting us this weekend, young men on their spring break from college. Our special friend, Stephan, wanted his house mates to see the real Florida. Stephan has grown up in Florida, son of environmental scientists.

My first viewing of them was to see one young man in cell phone mode striding around the pasture trying to get a connection, oblivious to the swallow tail kites overhead. The other young man was hunkered down at his computer trying to get an internet connection. Stephan was out checking on the property with his binoculars.

We had a wonderful dinner with them and Stephan's parents and brother Phil. We ate ribs off the grill, and by request, I made my famous exploding volcano cake. (Dry ice is the key.)

So interesting to see these young adults who are so accomplished and smart. Because I am old enough to be able to be totally eccentric I can ask hard questions at the dinner table. Seems that this generation is really NOT interested in politics or those dicey questions of ethics. It's
' whatever'.

There is, however, another group, and I count Stephan in this, who maybe do not demonstrate in any political way, but they are thinking and acting about being conservators of our planet. These young adults plant gardens, take responsibility for their environment, and think about careers that will help the world we live in. (I also think that the technophiles can do this!)

I just wish they would get up on their hind legs and be more vocal!

It has been a lovely spring season, despite the oak pollen that slays me.

Values: you have to be carefully taught

Why are we Americans so uncivil these days? What has happened to our values? When my candidate for presidents lost the election I was disappointed but I was brought up to believe that this person who would be our next president, even though not my choice, was chosen. Believing in the American democratic process, I made peace with this choice, recognizing that we are a disparate nation and we must move on. I revere the position of President of the United States, elected (most of the time!) by the people.

I am worried about this ugliness we see now in our nation, this strange meanness in our society. Where are the values of family and Christianity now? What are we thinking?

When I was a young child I would return from school and find my father in his disorganized study where he was writing a book. I'd jump into his lap, displacing the cat on his chest and he'd draw me a picture, read our book and we'd talk about the day. Later, as I grew up, his lap could not accommodate me, but we still talked.

My father was a devoted Christian and he made sure all his five kids were received in the church. We sang in the choir, were acolytes on Sunday, and we read the Bible. When I asked him, as a teenager, was Christ a communist, he took my question seriously and we had a long dialog going for many years. He was respectful of my questions, very strong in his intellectual way. He knew that he had given me the tools to think. He was a model for me of generosity and the necessity to examine all sides of a question. When I decided that Christianity was not for me, he accepted this.

I believe in democracy. The Constitution is so amazing it makes me cry with humility. I love the independent American spirit, and I believe we are like no other people on earth.

But, still, I am worried right now. I think we now have a president who truly wants to do the Right Thing. He wants to have universal health care so that all of us will be taken care of. Who could dispute this? And yet, we have the Republicans who monolithcally always vote NO, and have no better plan.

I think that we as a nation are very much on the wrong track. We need to get together to make this country work! Stop thinking of lining pockets of politicians (of both stripes), stop thinking of getting elected next time, just do the right thing for the people. Consider the issues. Think about the best values for all of us. Care for each other and stop the vituperation.

The Right Thing to Do

I am hopeful today after the passage of the health care reform yesterday. It is far from what I would like, but it is a start, as was Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. It will evolve into what most Americans want and rely on. This is the right thing to do, as our President has often said.

What concerns me as I think about this fiercely independent spirit of the American people, is the nastiness and meanness and lack of generosity I perceive right now. When is the line crossed?

I am a direct descendant of John Adams who was vilified in his time. Seems he had some cause to be hated, but, he too, wanted to do the right thing. So this is nothing new, this vitriol. We have grown to be a huge and populous country with many agendas striving to be paramount. We must not forget our responsibilities to see beyond the personal needs and desires we all have. We need to look to doing the right thing.

Abortion! o.k. So personally I may be against it. In countries where the people have universal health care, abortion rates are far below ours. This is because young folks have access to free birth control. I wonder why there is such an outcry about this (by old men in gray suits, otherwise known as politicians)? I conclude that this is really a non-issue concocted to get votes for politicians who really do not have a clue. There is another agenda, and it is probably race.

It seems to me that there have been very few politicians these days who vote with their conscience. Like the financial wizards motivated by their greed, politicians are for the most part just seeing to getting themselves elected next time don't ask me about doing the right thing.

Seems we just love the media circus, Glen Beck and all the rest (of both parties). We are the internet generation!

I love America! I love our spirit and I do not want to live in Europe or wherever. I love the raggedness of us, our sassiness, our questions and our inappropriateness. But I wonder about our generosity of spirit in these days? Florida is at the bottom of the heap of states in philanthropic giving and volunteerism. What's happened? Have we become misers, hunkered down with our own issues and suspicious of change? Would any one of us really cast a cold eye on a tiny illegal Mexican immigrant child who needs medical attention and not step up to the plate? Would any one of us kick that homeless old man under a bridge? Would we help?

We need politicians to say "YES" to a few things they believe in. We need them to be responsible to their view of what is the Right Thing to Do. Looking at last night's proceedings in the House, it seemed like such a zoo!

Just thinking..

Moving On and Happy to do It

This is our home now, the place we walk and discover and renew our commitment to the land and each other. We have owned this small patch of Central Florida in the Green Swamp for many years but until now it was not our primary residence.

We have sold our town house in St. Petersburg. The closing is next week. We are expecting to move to a place with our daughter and her son, maybe a duplex. But for now we are in limbo when we want to be in St. Pete where we have deep roots and love to see our friends.

I thought it would be sad to leave the town house after eight years, most of them before we retired. But as I look back, we were hardly ever there in daylight and at night we were busy still working on the ends of our day responsibilities.

As we approached the task of moving out of this place that for so long has seemed very impersonal compared to the ranch, we discovered so many 'nests' of stuff that had to be dismantled: Photos of the grandchildren, small drawings made by my favorite students, boxes of stuff left over from previous moves, and, of course, the junk drawers where everything was stowed. We took yet another vow to reduce the stuff.

We beat it into some kind of order for the packers and movers who will come next week and trucked a few boxes of stuff to the ranch. We incorporated the clothes and books we wanted to keep and took a whole bale to the Hospice thrift shop and the local library. I had a box of my treasures from many trips to South America so I changed the theme in the powder room from cows to the Amazon. Out with all those cows! They have gone to the attic because I cannot yet get rid of all the cow paraphernalia given to me by students. (I will sort out the attic boxes later- much later.)

So that left us with a table full of silver candy dishes and petit four plates and old jewelry from our mothers. Finally, I packed this up into boxes and it too will go into the attic.

For now, it seems that all our stuff has been culled. Today Andy went to a machine in the supermarket that counts coins, with ten years of loose change we had stashed in little containers everywhere. It amounted to $67.83! My studio is swept and the pencils are where they should be.

Tomorrow, I will throw the dimes found in the bottom of the dryer into some small container. I will throw that tack or that eraser or that set of instructions for some one of our possessions into the pristine junk drawer. Tomorrow, the new projects will spill over into disorganized joy.

I hate moving! It is a limited opportunity.

Ragtime

You will just have imagine it, no photo, a large barn on the premises of the Florida Pioneer Museum full of folks having paid to be at this first ever Ragtime Festival in this small Florida town. We arranged ourselves on those hard metal chairs, in front of the stage and the backdrop of farm implements and we surreptitiously eyed the strawberry shortcakes and the chocolate cakes on sale on tables back of us.

We had invited some friends from the city and they were late due to torrential rain in the afternoon, and another friend who found us in the parking lot. But finally, we all connected and settled down with our tickets for the raffle. I am cursed with having to count the house, not only for numbers, but also for the diversity of the crowd. Looking around it seemed to me that the great majority of the folks there in the audience were the white "Q-tips", white retirees from the trailer parks and snowbird homes who are interested in ragtime music. I saw no Hispanics and the only African American I saw was our young guest from Vista.

The program was just stellar! The star of the event was a ragtime pianist from New Orleans, backed up with a Florida jazz ensemble. There was a time for a local brass group from various high schools and we all loved that. (especially the little guy who played the tuba) We got lots of information about the birth of jazz from its beginnings in ragtime music. It was a most appreciative crowd! The next day there was a Ragtime parade to a park where ragtime music was played all day.

Why did this amazing event happen in our little town? Two years ago, two couples went to the midwest to attend an old time music event. They had such a wonderful time they began to think that our little town of Dade City Florida could host such an event. So, Virginia and Val began to plan how this could happen.

Virginia is an amazing person, so intelligent she leaves me in the dust! She is so shy and self effacing I could not believe she would put herself forward to head up this wonderful event. But, when she believes in something, she goes forth and does it. And, wow, was this event something fine! Neither she nor Val were ever in front of the mike. Virginia was not dressed up in costume, but I saw her going around to make sure everything was going according to schedule. As the music was happening I could see her feet tapping.

We loved the evening, the event, and our Florida friends who made this happen.

I love the surprises of living here.

The Princess in our Midst

Here is Princess Caroline with her wings and tiara and tutu and anything else she can think of. She has been visiting this week. This is my youngest grandchild of six, the only girl, and boy is she ever the girliest girl! We all sign on to this persona. But I wonder. What's a princess? Is it someone who is not capable and needs to be waited upon? Does a princess just sit and wave her sceptor and expect attention? Does a princess ever do anything? And do we even ask?

Thinking back of my own daughter, our baby woman, I remember how great it was to have a girl in the family after two brothers. I sewed great dresses for her and her dolls. But mostly she wore overalls and sturdy shoes (when she wasn't going barefoot). There was the time of the "rubber dress", a hand-me-down from an older friend. This thing was black and stiff, made entirely out of some ersatz polymer and had a lace collar and could stand on its own. She loved it and wore it every day for weeks. Like cement blocks, we never had to clean it. Then, that was over and she went back to more comfortable jeans.

Just thinking about this visit from the Princess, her older brother and her parents. We all fall into this play acting, and it is fun for sure. But this princess can catch frogs and crickets and look at a map and find Africa. And she can sure push her brother's buttons. What fun it has been for me, the grandma!

Another topic: we are moving! Our town house was put on the market last week and we have a buyer. So sudden, lots of cardboard boxes. I never thought this would happen so fast. Now we are looking for another place in St. Pete, a compound with our daughter and her son. The ideal thing is to buy a main house with a guest house on the property. Our daughter's house goes on the market next week. So we are all trying to get everything to work out for all our needs. (I thought I was through with all this!) But Grandma Molly is still here at the ranch, very happy with the scene of so much wild life and the gardens, and art in the studio, and the connection to this area.

I dream of being a princess, where all we will be done for me..

All those little gray boxes

Last night I was vegged out on the couch with the dog watching the last of the Olympic figure skaters. My husband finally went to bed and as he left he handed me a remote. When the last lovely skater was waiting for her scores, and my eyes were at half mast, I clicked the power button, and baloop, the screen went dark. You'd think that it was turned off, ready for the next day. But, no! I had done something wrong. When, the next evening, my husband wanted to watch PBS, the t.v. was all screwed up.

In our life we must have more than ten remotes for t.v.'s and radio and such. And each one of these has many many buttons and functions and applications and menus and ways to reach god.

Sorry to sound like Andy Rooney! It's kind of like learning a foreign language to manage these remotes. I know it is more difficult for us rural folk who must rely on iffy satellites to connect with the world. But still, why does it have to be so hard? Why is it that when I want to simply play a video for my grandson, I have to man two remotes and remember seventeen different actions to actually get "Curious George" on board? Aargh!

On my desk I have my three little bricks: my cell phone, my camera, and my ipod touch. I love them all and they have their uses. I especially love the ipod because it expects nothing from me, has a long battery life, and accompanies me with music when I garden and walk and tells me bird calls. This is an easy tech machine, no problem. I have come to know my complicated camera because I always use it. My cell phone is still an enigma. (If it's so smart, why is it so hard to use?) I should have gotten one of those basic old fart models!

My computer, my friend, system 7, works just fine for me. Nothing these days comes with instructions (as has always been the case with kids). You just have to figure it out on a case by case basis.

Even if the remotes are too remote for me to use comfortably, now I can get everything on my computer!

All this will be resolved soon. Remember when all washing machines had computers on board and touch pads and such? No more. We just want to wash the clothes and the manufacturers found this out. I am hoping the remote folks will pay attention.

Authentic

Jack is eight years old and he is in the midst of this year's production of the annual Shakespearean play at his school. All the students are fascinated with this. The 'project room' is full of incipient costumes and bits of scenery and the bulletin boards bristle with wonderful pictures of the various characters in the play. Today I brought a CD of images of Verona and Italy so the kids could see some pictures of Italian arches and architecture they might use as parts of their art for the play tee shirts they will make and wear proudly for this new production.

I go here every week to volunteer in the place I retired from as a teacher and director. My grandson now is in kindergarten with the most talented teacher of small kids I know. Quincy pays scant attention to me, and that is o.k. But he did save me a seat beside him so we could eat pizza together. He told me the entire plot of "Finding Nemo".

In the project room I am looking for scraps to use for designing the tee shirts, and there is a mom there who is helping with the costumes. Katherine and I chat a bit and start imagining the costumes the kids will wear. She has hit the estate sales and come up with some incredible medieval swags, perfect for the sleeves for Romeo's costume and I will connect these to the blue costume, designated for him. We wonder, who in the world would have anything like this in their house?

And, now I know. This evening, after a pelting rain commute home, we went to a so-called cottage meeting of folks hereabouts to learn about our local St. Leo University. We were dressed as usual (but clean!) Despite being under dressed for this catered event, many people sucked up to us because they knew we were major philanthropists in the community.

The house where we went was in a gated community with the usual conspicuous consumption names. A Jaguar and a Lexus in the courtyard. Looking around at the three living rooms, the huge gourmet kitchen, the media room, and the master bedroom with HUGE poofy bed things all in shades of beige, I had to go outside to draw breath. In the massive screened enclosure there was a koi pond ($300 a pop for the fish, as the proud owner told me.) There was a swimming pool with a couple of waterfalls, and I must say, it was quite beautiful.

I love being anonymous- in my jeans and kind of wrinkled and old. So I could poke around. And then, I saw it! There were the swags on some windows- the very ones, found at an estate sale that I will make tomorrow into the sleeves for the ten year old Romeo! Maybe next weekend these people will have another estate sale because of a foreclosure, and , who knows, we may have some more sleeves for Shakespeare!

Life comes around!

What can one say? ("My! You seem you have a large footprint on the earth?") This conspicuous consumption truly disgusts me and I truly wish we could be over that. Yet, I understand that some of these folks are really supportive to our local concerns.

Just so you know, blogger followers, I know how judgmental all this may seem. I try to be humble, but I have been opinionated since birth.

Staying current!

Glen Beck said the other day that he thinks that America is still in the morning, and that may be true. I am discouraged, however. One looks back in history and there have been times similar to these we are in.

Last evening we had a couple of young people here who walked with us out into the property- the swamp and the forest and the fields. They stayed for supper and all the time they talked and talked about what they were doing. They are Vista workers, now attached to Habitat for Humanity. Their main work is uncovering the history of African American cemeteries in our locale. Nia is black, Dave is white. For so long our community never acknowledged the presence of African Americans, and these two people are researching what happened to the families who are buried without tombstones.

Our local museum has since its beginning ignored the history of blacks and hispanics in our community. This is just a small issue to all the small historic preservations across the south but emblematic of where we are now in the 'morning of America'.

The young woman, such an idealistic American, wonders if the place we are in with such a lack of drive in Congress, such partisan bitterness, is really just a new reiteration of racial discrimination.

Her words discourage me, and yet, I cannot think of a better explanation for how so many members of congress just say NO to anything Obama.

Discouraged as I am in the so-called morning in America, I do love the clear skies and the warmth of the sun on my shoulders as I put in the spring garden and tenderly plant the cucumbers and peas and carrots and lettuce and hope for the best for the potatoes.

Sometimes I think that I should never pay attention to this partisan crap from Congress and just love the swamp and the potential of spring vegetables.

Something new to learn

Being out here in the boondocks, our satellite sometimes doesn't work, so no new image tonight.

Every year I try to learn or do something different and challenging and new to me. My project for this year is to learn Spanish. When I visited Colombia in October, I felt so deficient in my ability to get along in Spanish, I vowed to do better.

People told me that on line I could get some free language lessons. How to choose? I went for the Pimsleur method and they sent me ten lessons for free. This takes a half hour each day so I stick in the CD and sit back in my chair, totally focused, speaking back to those speakers who ask how many beers I want and is my husband sick. By now, I am way past those ten free lessons and am cheerfully paying into eternity. They ask you, almost make you sign in blood, that you will NOT look at anything written. You are learning how to speak in Spanish as a child would, all by ear.

As I progress, now almost half way through Spanish 2, I realize I can really operate on a pretty basic level. This week I attended a two hour meeting with Mexican women who were debating what should be done to make a float for a parade. With tremendous focus I could understand everything and I could even speak when asked. I can even speak in several tenses! And they understand (and don't laugh).

Getting over the hurdle of actually speaking out loud is hard, but I put myself out there having to do it. These women are with me on making a community garden so we have to talk about it and I often have to ask the names of vegetables. They are so happy to deal with my halting Spanish and I am amazed that they can understand me.

Learning a foreign language humbles me. I see all the kids I deal with each week who are bilingual. Here they are at a young age, functioning in two languages. I am determined to do it too.

Football is really dog fights

Just a short one. Superbowl night. This is like a dog fight, a blood sport. I would not want my children or grandchildren having their heads and limbs battered as football does to those players, "our heroes". There is enough research done about the many small and large concussions these players endure that make them sorry members of our population.

So, I am not hosting a super bowl party to night. We have no nachos and beer in front of the t.v. I am doing something else.

Being Old is a Hoot

No photo today. You'll just have to imagine.

Opera lovers we are, and so, finally we began attending the simulcasts of the Metropolitan Opera that are shown in local movie theaters all across the land. For years we listened to the Met on Saturday afternoons. We work in our studios and hear these productions, imagining the sets and the house and the musicians in the pit. Once a year or so we treat ourselves to a trip to New York to see the opera.

A few weeks ago we saw our first opera on simulcast HD. It was Carmen, and not knowing how popular this would be, we arrived in what we thought was good time and found the house almost full half an hour before the show. So we had to sit fairly close to the screen.

Despite some problems with the satellite, it was absolutely wonderful! Everyone in the audience of the sold out house talked to each other, checking on the plot and the singers.The woman sitting next to me actually clasped my hand as she worried that Carmen's dress might fall off!

Today, in a stiff chilly wind, we went back to this bleak movie complex theater in the midst of a dying shopping mall to see a Verdi opera neither of us had ever heard before. Again, it was a sold out house. We arrived with a bag of sandwiches and fruit we planned to eat before the opera. (The only food available in the whole mall is the overpriced nachos and hot dogs you can get at the theater.)

Outside this sterile theater we can immediately identify the other opera goers. Mostly they are the elderly and retired, all white or Asian. (I always notice these things) Because this is the Opera, we all talk to each other. ( Can you imagine it? Placido Domingo singing Baritone?)There is no play bill to tell us the plot or the names of the singers or the producers, or the names of the contributors. But people stop by our primo place in the front, just before the rail I can put my feet on, and they talk about the opera to come. This is better than any Playbill.

We are all there in this sold out house, in our jeans and sensible shoes, old. We have no fear of being thought odd. We are odd! There was a woman down the row who had brought a head lamp so she could read her book while waiting in the twilight for the opera to begin. And we had our picnic to be consumed while we watched the preliminaries of the opera.

And what a show! We sat there, mesmerized for three hours. The intermissions were fifteen minutes long, but we were shown what goes on back stage as they changed the sets, the musicians in the pit, and interviews with the principals.

The opera was wonderful with such amazing singing, we could forgive the ridiculous plot.

We all left, we q tips and the folks with walkers and a few youngsters. And we were all in agreement that we'd had a very nice Saturday afternoon.

Late Winter

Here is the view from our house these wintry mornings. No frost since the last devastating freezes of December, but it is still cold in the mornings and I don't want to get out in the garden and dig. I did put in a long row of peas and a bed of beets and the new collard and broccoli starts are doing well.

We have had two weeks of guests that I love. Still, it takes energy and lots of rearrangements so we are getting back to our usual routines.

More than ever I am embedded in our local school, Lacoochee. Each Tuesday I go to a certain class and we cook something and spend a lot of time reading out loud. This week, while the mac and cheese we made from scratch bubbled in the oven, we read several chapters of Little House on the Prairie.

Why won't classroom teachers read to kids every day? It's by far the most effective thing one can do to promote reading, as all the research shows.

The kids leaned on me and there was total silence as I read. (I am a very dramatic reader.) Then, we served the macaroni and had conversations. By now, some of the teachers know about these Tuesday afternoons, and they come, supposedly to work on their computers. But, really, they are listening intently, as are the kids, to the story. And they love the food, too.

After my classroom gig I went to inspect the small garden project for parents. Yes, all the plants are well cared for and I see many flats of plant starts also there. So amazing!

On Monday I will go to the meeting for parents and I will bring more seedlings and seeds. I will tell those parents in my halting Spanish that this week we'll have more containers for their gardens, a better hose, and a garden shed for their tools. All free! I have a Vista worker on board to help. I am imagining that eventually we'll have a proper tilled vegetable garden, but for now we are going for containers.

The folks in the Lacoochee administration are great and give me free reign. Parents are on board, kids help.

Meanwhile those teachers struggle with a mountain of paperwork about the FCATS and they never have enough time to do what they really want to do with their groups. Everyone hopes devoutly that the FCAT and NCLB will pull back and actually let teachers teach!