Happy New Year, happy New decade

ve a very wonderful new year!

Smells like Christmas

Here is my guy serving up one of our delicious company meals he has cooked. It is a cornucopia of wonderfully tasty food we have grown and cooked. In this week to come we will host another meal and our friends will burst in on cool breezes carrying additions to the meal and suddenly the air will be full of loud and loving talk and catching up and a lot of laughter. Peter will bring his signature chocolate cookies, others will come with armloads of fish and ham and we'll have greens from the garden. Our grandson, Quincy will run around, happy with the many Christmas presents he received.

I love this season, second only to Thanksgiving. Christmas is not very stressful to me because I do not decorate much or obsess about wrapping the few material gifts I give. I am so grateful for the wonderful family and gifts I have.

What I do obsess about is the expectations we all have. Today I went into our small town to volunteer as an art instigator for a group of twenty orphans, in age from nine to seventeen, from the Baptist Children's home in Lakeland. These kids were here in our town for a wonderful day. First, they went into a local bank lobby where there was a Christmas tree and gifts for every child, provided by local businesses and families. It was hard to tell who the guests were but I could certainly see that there were many photographers and P R people there. All proud to be the sponsors of Orphans at Christmas. The kids pretty much ignored them, but I could not help thinking that these kids were used to being poster kids for the needy at Christmas. (Other times of the year we conveniently do not think about them.)

After the gift distribution, the kids walked down to the art gallery where we had a hands on art activity. I had brought many skeins of yarn, craft sticks and all the rest so that these kids could make (and take) god's eyes. Many of the kids really took to this activity and made professional looking works of art. Those huge male teen agers really got into it, quickly learned the moves and helped the other younger kids. Time passed in a flash and when they needed to move on to their next activity they wanted more. So I filled their arms with many balls of yarn, the left over craft sticks and their brains full of how to do it. I think after this day they will most remember that they learned how to make something beautiful.

And I really do know that what these children want most is to have their very own loving family. It kills me.

I guess it's kid by kid that will save the world. And if you think you are doing it, be quiet about it. We don't need P R and plaques, hand shakes in front of audiences. It is enough to just do it. After Christmas, maybe into March, let's see what those orphans need. Maybe not a fake Christmas tree in a bank lobby surrounded by plastic gifts from China. Maybe they could use and love a few days in the country and learn to ride a horse or plant a garden or look at the night stars and be with a real family. And be treasured. It would be harder, uncomfortable, but worth it.

So much better than candy canes!

Christmas is a gift. Think carefully about this.

Happy Christmas to all.

Waiting for the holidays

It's a new tradition for us, but it seems just right. We all order the red snappers and fix them Chilean style, surrounded by green rice, tomatoes and collards. This year we'll have twenty people the day after Christmas, so we are augmenting all this with a ham.

Now, five years since we retired, we still flop around somewhat, but we are making a wonderful new network of friends here and connect with our old friends (some are young!)

Every day I get up and greet the wonderful possibilities of the day ahead. By the time I get down to my studio the sand hill cranes have noisily flown in to begin their day of elegant striding and pecking. They would love it if I would ever open the vegetable garden gate so they could nip off the new lettuces. But of course, I won't.

I have bought a few poinsettias to line the walk to the front door now decorated with a wreath. Everything looks very festive and ready for the several holiday events about to happen here.

I am generally not into holiday decorating, but this year, thanks to Quincy, we have a Christmas tree. I may replace the tired candles on the mantle with something more festive, and I will display the wonderful Christmas stockings (even one for Lola, the dog!) knitted by our dear friend, Lucy. I have installed the holiday towels in the bathroom. I'm ready.

Just before Christmas our middle son, Ben, is coming for a few days, and our daughter Elizabeth and her son, Quincy. I rejoice in this. We do not require all the family to gather at Christmas or at any other time. We have had many Christmases when we did this, and it was lovely, with the sheer expansiveness of it all. And, when our kids were young we had the set traditions of Christmas with the stockings and gifts. That was a fun time, but then we all fanned out and the children began their own traditions in their own places.

Now, we have even curtailed the amount of gifts given, and we let all the family know that we do not need or want for anything. I have taken to sending my young relatives notification that they are the recipient of a gift to Heifer International of a goat or a water buffalo or a llama. We don't know what they want!

I walk out into the field and see the red berries so thick on the holly. It is the holiday season and I am truly satisfied.

Lola, our dog, the perfect dog

O.K. this is an old subject for so many of us. I don't have a picture of Lola to head this because my new computer has prissily sent my picture files elsewhere because I didn't label them. You'll have to imagine a very small dachshund, still with a waist, a double silver dapple, ( a mix of black and white spots) and one blue eye and one brown eye. Unlike her owner, she still attracts attention.

She is totally devoted to her humans and is overly social so sometimes when we have guests she particularly loves I tell her to get in her kennel and cool down. "Get packed!"

At eleven years old she is still sparky and loves our daily walks. She looks between Andy and me to see that we are really going somewhere, and then she's off! Today we walked along the edges of the fields and then took a cow path through the palmettos. Lola is so small she avoids the spider webs and can scramble under the underbrush. Like all of her breed she's stubborn so when she ferrets out an armadillo she really wants to bark at it endlessly and she won't get with the program of just taking the walk, unless I speak to her severely.

When we come out into the pasture with the long grass Lola likes to scrunch down and hide and she's totally invisible. The game is that we call her and There she is! She lopes along, soft ears flying, nose to the wind, short legs pumping.

She came to us as a six weeks old puppy we immediately fell in love with. The first night we put her in the kennel in our bed room and there was much whining, so pitiful. "If I had wanted to sleep with a dog I would have married one," my husband said. Ten minutes later he relented and Lola quietly and comfortably settled down under his chin like a small loaf of warm bread. And she's been our bed every night since. In cold weather we appreciate how dogs run hot and in the summer we grumble.

I took Lola to work with me every day for the first years of her life and the kids in my school really socialized her. Now, she's mostly here on the ranch and has complete access to the outdoors. I spent many hours teaching her to be a good dog while I stood out there in rain and iffy weather. In town, I spent a lot of energy teaching her how to walk on a leash, well worth the effort. And, horrors! we spent lots of time in the dog parks where Lola learned that the part for small dogs was really O.K.

We had another dog before Lola but I had tons of kids in my face, no time and no energy to spare to carefully train an animal. That dog was lovely to us, but I regret my lack of caring.

So we now have this eleven year old dog who is still young and she is still funny and such a big part of our routine. In the mornings she nags us until we get up from the table and sink into the couch to read the papers. She hops up to warm my husband's hip. Then she wants to go out on the front porch to get the sun rays and she lies there, a small spotty burrito next to the door in the sunshine. After lunch she comes into the kitchen to tell me that It Is Now Time for Molly to lie down and read for an hour because I, Lola, will take a nap on whatever sofa Molly has chosen.

After dinner, Lola is again warming Andy's hip and thinking that soon, soon! she'll go out to pee and then we'll lift her onto our high bed and she can burrough down under the covers, warming up the bed until we come.

A dog's life, so simple and comical.

We Americans love our dogs, large and small. We stroke their wonderful fur and put up with their nonsense. These are the creatures who love us unconditionally and they make us happy.

Yard Birds

Here is Bob, the crane, just preparing to cross the cattle guard into our yard. Emily, his spouse has already crossed, elegantly stepping out like a careful queen. For the last week this pair has spent most of the day pecking in the sparse grass right outside the door to our house. I am quite sure this is the same couple I obsessed about last spring as they tragically tried to become parents. The male is slightly larger than the female and of course they look identical to every other sand hill crane. But I am convinced that these are indeed Bob and Emily. They have certain personalities I know. For the most part they are loving and amicable, even to doing a few dances in the front yard. And then there are the marital spats accompanied by such bugling it causes us to run out to see what the hullabaloo is all about. By mid afternoon they climb carefully to the top of the mulch pile, flap their huge wings and depart over the barbed wire fence and head for the pond.

No day passes when I don't rescue the frogs and lizards and spiders and stick insects and snakes that mistakenly appear inside. "You don't want to be in the shower," I say to the frog as I scoop it up and release it outdoors.

I have had a happy accomplice this week- my grandson Quincy. He sees that these useful critters are not to be feared or tormented. He's not one of those kids who wants above all to catch frogs or lizards to hold them. He just regards them as a part of the natural place. He and I look with wonder at spider webs and mole trails. We wonder if bats will ever come to live in the bat house we put up during the summer.

The vegetable garden is looking a bit frayed. We still have lettuce, broccoli, carrots and collards with peas and cabbages to come. But I have given up on weeding the pathways and have given them over to the zinnias and weeds. I need a new round bale of hay so I can cover the weeds.

The orchids by the pool are still beautiful and the roses appreciated all the rain we had this week. Seems that these knock out roses will tolerate anything. Even the deer don't touch them. The perennial beds are dying back but the plants around the water garden look fine. Our orange grove got such a hit with the frosts last winter, there is not much fruit this year. Our neighbors have been generous so we are juicing every day.

Who would have thunk it? That a person with a background of urban digs in Beirut, New York, Paris and Washington would find such a perfect niche in rural Dade City. I love visiting big cities and I need the urban fix every so often, but here is what I truly love. I especially love to share my life with the many friends and family who come and appreciate this paradise. Those yard birds say it all.

Saving the world, kid by kid

Of course, in our lives we want to make a difference in our small bailiwick, and we have big dreams of making a huge global impact. Bill and Melinda Gates can do this as can others who have oceans of money. But there are legions of us small potatoes who are making change and doing good.

Volunteering is one of the greatest pleasures and hardest things of life after retirement. Americans are the most generous people (also the meanest and tightest!). There are so many of us who go out on a regular basis and deliver Meals on Wheels, cook and serve food to the needy, coach kids' teams, teach people to read, serve on community committees, clean up the coasts, volunteer in schools, rescue wildlife and do so many things that enrich our communities.

We do not do this to accrue plaques of appreciation. We do it because we believe we can make even a small difference in the quality of life for the people we serve. And also we do what we do because it is interesting to us and brings intrinsic rewards.

The photo shows kids immersed in a science project - not something in their regular curriculum, but something a volunteer (me!) could do to enrich the teaching. As a regular volunteer in two schools, one, private and middle class, the other maybe the poorest public school in Florida, I see that all kids are the same in their eagerness to learn. This photo is of the middle class and privileged, but if you colored the faces brown the photo would be the same.

This week in Lacoochee School we had the kick-off of the community gardens project, near and dear to my heart. I have this vision of a large community garden in this very low-income community. If people can grow and harvest their own food they will be physically healthier and it will be such a community bond. The principal of the school who is first and foremost a community organizer ("The bottom line is the kids"), is behind this and will gladly make part of the school yard available for the garden. But I am thinking that this garden should really be located between the rows of public housing units. I am going to talk to the person in charge of this. What nonsense it is to prohibit having a garden there! Why our own family vegetable garden works is that it's so near our kitchen!

So, after my gig in my adopted fourth grade classroom, I went out to the small beginnings of a container garden with my flats of cold-hardy broccoli and collards. I prepared the dirt and planted those seedlings and waited to see if anyone I had invited would appear.

And then the Mexican women trooped over to this small beginning next to the side of the school. The school care takers had generously and promptly supplied a hose for watering.

We stood there around the plastic kiddie pool and the other containers with the brave collard and broccoli seedlings. We spoke of this small beginning that could be the start of something big. They decided to have a rotation of people who would water the plants and keep an eye out. I volunteered my husband to build a compost container.

As I left, I told them that now, it was up to them. I walked down the hill to my car and I saw them still standing there, talking animatedly.

Volunteering to do an actual something is quite different from just writing a check (though that is important also). Doing hands-on stuff keeps you humble and polishes your heart.

The Season for Celebration and wonder?

Thanksgiving was just as predicted. No need to send out that photo of the nicely browned turkey and the large salmon fillet, all the side dishes familiar and strange, and all of us, more than twenty sitting down to the mismatched dinnerware with arms around our young ones. Just imagine the love and boisterousness permeating our farm house. An American Thanksgiving, and the best.

Today we have been trying to figure out what health plan we should adopt to supplement Medicare. We have been to informational meetings, read the stuff from the various insurance companies. For every plan there is a 'gotcha' so there is no clear best one. Our retirement health plan from my husband's old work place was canceled due to the economic situation. We have pretty much decided to go with traditional Medicare and add a prescription drug plan to it. This should be simple..

Even if one selected a more pricey drug plan, it is still incredibly inexpensive compared to the health plans those folks under 65 need to have. There is a deduction from my social security benefit of about $300 a month. (Less for lower income folks.) Then, on top of that I would pay about $40 per month for Part D which is the prescription drug benefit. So, I will be paying under $350 a month for health insurance. And, like everyone else, I'll pay the modest co-pays when ever I visit a doctor or order a prescription drug.

Of course, I wonder about all those people who have no clue about what to do, or have no money at all? The government option that all seniors have- it's called Medicare- automatically deducts the standard Medicare premium based on income. I have been impressed with the user friendliness of the Medicare website and the folks in the social security offices.

What appalls me is the level of difficulty for young people and their children to wend their way through the system of private insurance. The premiums are so expensive! So many of our citizens haven't a clue about what to do. They have no money and are powerless. When the baby is desperately sick they go the nearest emergency room. They don't have the $20 in their pocket even for a co-pay.

What are we thinking? What a sad and miserable country this is that does not treasure our children and young people. I despair of having any health care reform bill pass. It is being nibbled to death by ducks (the old white guys in suits who pander to their election in the next campaign).

In my dreams I envision a culture in America where children and families are valued. They have access to first quality health care, their teeth are cared for, they eat nutritious and whole foods in their schools. In my dreams I see legislators thinking altruistically and pragmatically about these issues and not pandering to special interests (the pharmaceutical industry,big business of any stripe, the right and left wing nuts etc.)

All is not to despair. I live in a community that has many caring people who think about these issues and put in their time and thought and energy to change the status quo. They work by challenging the local politicians, making their voices heard. They work for change, and sometimes it can happen.

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!