What's Cooking, Wiz??
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It is the end of rhubarb season. We've eaten some as sauce (I never did get around to making a rhubarb pie), but there's something I really love to have in the pantry: rhubarb-carrot-orange marmalade. Made with organic fruit and carrots and organic sugar, it is simply yummy on toast, in sandwiches or spread between layers of angel-food cake.
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When I began gardening back in 1975, I also began learning to cook and preserve food. Canning isn't difficult. You just have to do it carefully, mindful of cleanliness and correct processing techniques and times. This is a water-bath canner; the device you see beside the jars is a jar lifter for removing the cans from the boiling water. I also have a pressure-canner which is used for low-acid (generally non-fruit) foods. In August I'll be canning some tomatoes and dehydrating many more, pickling some beets and green beans (yummy!); in September perhaps I'll make applesauce and watch the bees buzz at my windows, drawn by the smell. Corn, soybeans, kale, swiss chard and brussels sprouts will go in the freezer. Potatoes will be dug and stored in bags in the cellar, onions and garlic go in a dry, dark place next to the cellar stairs. All year long we will enjoy the fruits of these labors.
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My parents' and grandparents' generations were quick to adopt "modern" ways, and so these days not too many people preserve food. It's a shame, because you just can't buy some of the wonderful things you can make. In these jars you can see the orange bits of carrot, and the lighter bits of ground whole oranges, all of them swimming in a sweetened rhubarb sauce. As the book Putting Food By says, "This recipe is as good and honest as it is 'out of the way'."
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I dream of a garden replacing every lawn, of plates and cellars filled with organically grown food. Yes, it's a bit of work, but it's gratifying work and it makes so much sense. Imagine the healthy, great taste. Imagine the peaceful quiet of suburbia without the drone and pollution of lawnmowers. Imagine...
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Resources:

• Putting Food By, by Janet Greene, Beatrice Vaughn, and Ruth Hertzburg. ("To 'put by' is an old, deep-country way of saving to 'save something you don't use now, against the time when you'll need it...')


• The Ball Blue Book This is the most comprehensive how-to book on food preservation, featuring gourmet and special diet recipes, along with classic home canning and illustrated step-by-step instructions.

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"People. They're the worst."
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A Wizardly Rant

(Quote from Jerry Seinfeld)

Recently Robin asked her readers what each of us are doing to stop global warming/climate change. I was sobered and embarrassed by my meager list of attempts, depressed by the fact that I - one so vocally irate about the lunacy of the human race in this regard - was doing very little about it. Facing my complacency moved me to take some actions.

Effort #1 aimed at saving our planet: I bought some fluorescent light bulbs. No, not for all of the lights in our house, but I got some "daylight" and some white light bulbs to see if we could stand the neon glow. Surprise! The color of the light is great! The "daylight" bulbs are good in places like the woodshed and the basement, where there give strong, bright light; the 15 watt white bulbs are just fine in reading lamps, and unless you can actually see them, you would not know they're not strong incandescents. Okay, good move, and I will now replace all of our old bulbs with these more energy-efficient fluorescents, but eventually they will have to be recycled. They must not just be thrown in the trash.
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Effort #2 aimed at saving our planet: Double my commitment to using cloth grocery bags instead of the plastic ones dispensed ad infinitum by the grocery (and other) stores. Refuse their bags; use my own.
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Effort #3 aimed at saving our planet: muttering to husband about how we are driving too much and not efficiently. We need to plan our trips to town, cooperate to use ONE vehicle, etc. Or we need to move. This resulted in Husband riding his bike the 13 miles to the office. He's been doing that about once a week on the days I need to go to town for supplies, and then we load up the bike and drive home together. (It's generally downhill to town from our house).
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Effort #4 aimed at saving our planet: We bought a Prius! This is a nifty car and driving it has convinced us that it is a vast improvement over anything we've ever driven. It is both simple and complex, simple because it doesn't even have a key - you just push the "Power" button. Drive, Reverse, something called "B", and Park" are your options; chosen by the one-finger flip of a small lever. We are averaging over 50 mpg, and yesterday we drove 70 miles, and we did it using only slightly more than one gallon. Of course, we must drive less.


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Our efforts so far have convinced us that we can make some positive changes in the way we live, but of course we're still not doing enough. We need to find clean ways to generate our power and heat our water. The Prius has taught us the value of driving a bit slower. There is a screen that shows you what mileage you're getting at any moment and over time. You can often go 65 on our country roads, but when you do, you get poor gas mileage. Driving more slowly and mindfully of your gas usage gets you where you're going and cuts pollution by saving gas.

Since I'm self-righteously preaching in this post, I'll add this comment: People are dying in Iraq so that we can have oil. If you're going to roar around at fast speeds in a gas-guzzling automobile, please take the hypocritical "Support Our Troops" ribbon off it. If you really do support our troops, slow down and drive less so that they don't need to fight for you. And senators and congresspeople, please pass a law lowering the speed limit.

NASCAR, hydroplane racing, air shows and other entertainments that burn oil for entertainment suck. Try walking, biking, music, sports and other pleasures that don't pollute. Again, if we're wasting fuel, we have some blood on our hands.

Maybe you think climate change is "a natural thing" or that "yeah, there's some global warming going on, but it's not that bad," or maybe like the Republican Administration you say "it needs to be studied more" or "we can't hamper economic productivity with environmental restrictions" (instead of doing something about it). If so, imagine how inconvenient it will be to learn that there isn't enough food to feed your family because of crop failures caused by weather events. We're already seeing some of these events (droughts, unseasonable freezes, high-wind storms dumping hail); we will see more and more if we continue our ways. And that's just the beginning.

Yesterday my just-turned-five-years-old grandson overheard us talking about "losing eight years" of progress toward energy efficiency and turning the tide of global environmental destruction. He wanted to know what I meant by "we lost eight years." His question led to an explanation: We have a leader for our country who is called a president, and right now his name is Mr. Bush. Mr. Bush is a bad man. ("Why?) Mr. Bush is greedy. ("What does 'greedy' mean?") That means he wants things just for himself and for his friends, and he doesn't care about the rest of us. A good president would try to do what's best for everybody. (That seemed to answer his questions).

A beat of silent thought, then Grandson replied, "Well maybe Jesus will come down and show him that he should be good so he can go to heaven." (Pause...) (Giggle...) "Then maybe he'll be DEAD!" At that, we all laughed.
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As long as I'm ranting... GUNS... No, not relevant. I've ranted enough for one post. No, wait. Guns: Let's shoot the people who just don't "get it." People. They're the worst. Wizards. They're a close second.

Here's My Latest...

Harry and Jane Before the Storm
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The barn, protected by its lightning rods, awaits them; the corn, not yet mid-sized, will have to withstand the force of the wind-blown rain. Before going inside, the farmer will check the generator to be sure it's ready to take over if power is knocked out. With some luck, tomorrow the sun will rise on a farm still anticipating a good crop and a prosperous season.
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Where's Wizard??

The demands of the season are keeping me away from the keyboard lately. The garden is almost all planted, but then comes the weeding. I snap a few pictures of especially pretty flowers, but even photography is on the back burner right now. A pasture fence needs mending; the garden fence needs some electricity to it. Son, daughter, grandson and I all celebrate birthdays within one month's time, and at the moment, two out of our (formerly) three vehicles are out for the count. And then there's the pinched nerve in my back. You can get NOTHING done while lying flat on the floor.

I need more time!!!!!!!

In lieu of a "better" post, here is a little flying critter I've often tried to capture on "film" and - until recently - never quite got in focus: the Hawk Moth (also called a Hummingbird Moth), here visiting a flower garden.

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And a "flower among the flowers" at Upper Canada Village:

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Hope all of you are well. I'll get back to visiting you soon.

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Time Travel

I went back to 1867 yesterday, just in time for sheep-shearing.* ...The sheep were docile and cooperative as the clippers gradually removed their thick woolen burden.

At the other end of the village, a woman worked at washing the fleece (a job more likely done by men in 1867).



Before carding, the washed wool was placed outdoors to dry.



Clean, dry, and gently twisted into coarse strands of about 2" diameter, the first shearing harvest was already being spun into woolen thread. It will be woven into cloth for clothing and blankets for the winter.



Here's looking at ewe!



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* Upper Canada Village is a living history park in eastern Ontario, created from collected buildings and artifacts that would have been flooded when the St. Lawrence Seaway was built.

We Got Game!

As folks who visit my blog regularly know, I have a friend who is a Shaman. She would correct me to say that she's an Assistant Shaman or a Shaman in Training or some such Lesser Shaman (maybe like the Least Flycatcher: every bit as wonderful as, say, the Acadian Flycatcher, but just living a bit farther north).

Every day, Shaman emails three or four new poems to her friends. My husband, being her occasional racketball partner, was on the receiving list, and so it was that I happened to read a couple of them. I was hooked. There, in beautiful words, were many of the same things I was photographing. I emailed her a photo that paired wonderfully with one of her poems and asked to be put on her mailing list. That was the start of it.

After a few weeks, I put up a blog called Shaman and Wizard and began publishing her poems and adding photos to illustrate some of them. For a while we kept it quiet and private, although I was secretly eager for the world to see our creations. Eventually she agreed to share.

Often a poem sends me out in search of the right picture; sometimes I'll send her a photo and wait for the almost inevitable poetic response. Sometimes things just get plain funny, as in the following exchange. It started when I posted this photo of one of Shaman's concrete statues (among other things, she's a sculptor). For me, it was a good exercise in learning some photo editing tricks.
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...................................Becky Atop Whiteface at Sunset

Whiteface Mountain is near Lake Placid. There is a road that winds up to its summit (which is rocky and bare and commands a magnificent view of that part of the Adirondacks), so most people around here are familiar with it.

I didn't have to wait too long... a couple of days after posting that photo on the Sha-Wiz site, this poem arrived in my Inbox:

Whiteface Naked

I didn’t climb naked
I really didn’t,
it was the hot sun,
the dizzying heights,
distant views,
my then love near,
yes, I took off my clothes,
the picture sold
by him
to some blog for little
money and all
my dignity.
But I do not regret
the moment
when the sun and her colors
stroked
me
as he never could.

By Becky Harblin May 27, 2007

It struck me so funny that I just had to share it with you. I hope you'll check out some of her other writing on the Shaman and Wizard site. You'll find a few of my photographs there too.

A Stroll in the Park

Here's a view across the village green. After my truck was towed (see previous post), I hoofed it here to wait for a ride home.

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The next photograph should be clicked on. It takes on the quality of an impressionist painting when enlarged.

The metal of the fountain (possibly copper?) is a dark gray but reflects the blue of the pool below it.





I was not alone in my enjoyment of the fountain on this hot afternoon.






And in a small garden nearby is this message:




...a dream for most of us, a reality in this small village park.

On this Memorial Day weekend, it seems to me that the most meaningful ceremony in remembrance of the dead of wars past and present would be the this: the celebration of a world at peace.
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My Lucky Day

............................... Bell's Garage in Earlier Days *

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If you’ve ever been in an accident, you know the sound: the smashing crunch of metal on metal. The lucky ones among us get out of the car upset but not hurt, and then forever hold that sound in memory. For me it’s been three slight fender-benders spaced over about 45 years of driving.

Lately I’ve had a reoccurring fear of that crunching sound that is somehow unexpectedly stimulated while I’m driving, perhaps caused by the sudden realization that I’m day-dreaming or not focused sharply enough on the activity at hand. I shudder as my eyes open wider and quickly look out for the imagined other vehicle. I wince in expectation of the smashing crunch. So far it hasn’t happened, and I’m left wondering why this strange fear is asserting itself. My experiences being minor collisions, I wonder how people who have had really serious wrecks react to it.

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Maybe my imaginings are being sparked by an incident that happened about a year ago. As I loaded my groceries into the back seat, I heard that unmistakable sound as three cars tangled up in a – fortunately – low speed wreck in the entry to the shopping center lot. No one was hurt, and so it was apparently just another case for the insurance companies and local body shop folks to wrangle over. I can think of no other possible trigger for my current paranoia.

Today I drove my old pick-up truck to town, planning to pick up some lumber and saw-horses from my son-in-law, a chair I’d bought, groceries and garden supplies. My to-do list was long and involved a number of places on all sides of the village we call “town". It was a stop and go day.

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By early afternoon I’d crossed off several things on my list. Taking the lane behind the Main St. buildings, I swung into the local fast-food restaurant for a bathroom stop, stepped on the brakes, and didn’t stop. The pedal went to the floor, but the truck maintained every bit of its speed. I saw a vacant parking spot and aimed for it, bouncing backward when the tires hit the concrete curb that defines the lot’s perimeter.

I sat there in my truck. I thought of the people I’d stopped for in crosswalks that morning, of the car I waited behind at the red light, of the trip a few days earlier carrying a full load of shredded bark mulch out the hilly back roads to my house. And then I went inside to tell the restaurant owner that my truck might be in her lot for a while.

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There are two garages within walking distance of downtown, so I bought a bottle of water and hit the sidewalks. Tonight my truck sits at Bell’s Riverside Garage and I sit at home, thankful that my brakes failed at probably the best possible time and place, thankful that the only consequences are towing and repair bills. I guess it was my lucky day.

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* As I waited for the wrecker to deliver my truck, I noticed this framed photo of the garage and snapped a copy of it.

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Wistful

Prologue:

Robin left a comment to my blog about becoming a photographer that she felt there was something “wistful” about the piece. She was correct, but not for the reasons she may have suspected. You see, that was to be my swan song, my exit from Bloggerville. I had run into a wall. The passion I had felt for writing seemed to have written itself out or maybe been shoved aside by the season’s outdoor activities. I would take a break, possibly a long break. But then a strange thing happened. Writing “Photography” stirred up the creative juices again, and suddenly I wanted to write some more. Today's entry is titled “Wistful” because of Robin's comment, but you will find there is nothing wistful about it. (Thanks, Robin).

This three-year stretch of time, though significant, was just one part of the path that ultimately led me home.

“Have you been to that new home shop in The Commons?”

“Dan and I just bought a king Beautyrest, and we adore it.”

“Don’t you just love this dip mix?”

“You want the side-by-side Frigidaire. It’s just so much easier.”

“Who did you get to decorate?”

"I just let Jim deal with the lawn. I have enough to do keeping the house neat."


When I think back to that time, those office cocktail parties remember like a Robert Altman movie where you catch bits and snippets of conversations, getting the suggestion of substance without ever really experiencing it. Other times I remember them in the clear focus of Woody Allen when he totally mis-fits at a WASP dinner party. In both cases, those years seem like they were lived on another planet in a galaxy far, far away.

Beginning in the summer of 1968, I was an IBM salesman's wife. I bought the right things (or at least the ones that we could afford), mimicked suburban dress, and lived in a new split-level house. I've always been a bit of a chameleon, so although it was a change from anything I'd ever experienced, it wasn't a difficult role to play.

On some days I longed for wall-to-wall carpeting and coordinating drapes, but the colors and patterns that appealed to me weren’t “the latest fashion” and so couldn't be found in the stores that sell such stuff (or maybe subconsciously something deep within me was repulsed by the idea of conforming). In my little suburban castle, wooden floors peeked out around remnant rugs, and windows were hung with home-made curtains. Our house wasn’t shabby; it was - like one of its occupants - just a little schizophrenic.

One thing that had enamored me of this particular house was that the lot was large and backed up to the remains of an orchard. In fact, our back yard had been part of that orchard, as the apple tree outside the dining room window attested, and the large barn that once graced the acreage-turned-housing tract straddled the two "vacant" lots next-door. I secretly loved this weathered, elephantine "eyesore" and sometimes took my 2-year-old daughter into it to explore and play.

The neighbors were nice folks, although they always struck me as being adults. The women and I had mom-hood in common. None of us worked “real” jobs, so we did the things suburban women do - swapped recipes and potty training strategies, watched each other's children, kept house (to varying degrees), and shopped - but that was about where our commonality ended. They did crafts; I tore the boards off another old barn and paneled my family room. When it was finished, I framed up a darkroom beside it. I dug up some evergreen trees from a nearby wood and planted them in my front yard.

Subconsciously at least, I fought this IBM wife role. At social events my skirt was too short, my hair too long. I tried to convince myself that the other salesmen and their wives were swell people (which they probably were) even though they reminded me of what we called “the clique” back in my high school days.

My husband was a good salesman, in fact, one of IBM’s top 15 rookies nationwide that year. My husband also drank. He always had, but in college everybody drank and it was considered normal. Now he drank more. We argued about it, and his drinking began to fit into a pattern of drink too much, promise not to drink any more, have “just one drink” (which the next night became two, and then the following night three), and then he’d make the same unrealistic promise and the cycle would start again. On day four of these cycles, things got thrown and smashed. As he was wont to point out, my upbringing by a pair of tea-totalers didn’t help matters. For the first time in my life, I began to experience a long stretch of unhappiness, worry and fear.

Depression crept over me like a fog. Self-pity and anger tangled up with love and despair. There were weeks when yesterday’s dirty dishes littered the place until I had to use them again, and there was the night we stood together in the kitchen, separated by only a few feet and his drunkenness, and I edged closer to a chef’s knife lying on the counter with the intention of plunging it into him, stopped only by the more rational thought that he was big and strong and that I, the mother of a toddler, couldn’t afford to chance dying.

I’d seen the dysfunctional families of my foster sisters, watched them struggle and self-destruct. Some were just way down on their luck, but most were pathological and made poor choices or allowed other people to beat them down. I somehow reasoned that if I remained in my current situation, I was as sick as they were. It wasn’t any brilliant motivator, but that thought – that I was as sick as those poor people if I stayed where I was – somehow gave me the strength to take action.

Months of separation and counseling followed. During the separation I moved "home" to my parents' house in a neighboring town. I found a part-time job waitressing and another in the community services office of a juvenile detention center, enrolled my daughter in daycare, and bought a car, all steps to regaining some measure of the independence I had lost to the marriage. In early September, we reconciled and I returned to married life under the conditions that I would keep my day-job and I would take an already-planned trip to Norfolk to visit my old singing partner. Counselling continued, and things were better, but by Thanksgiving I knew they were not good enough. I would wait until after the holidays...

Christmas came and passed, and then New Year's, but inertia had me in its grip and married life continued.

Three days into the new year, a man walked into the probation office where I was working. I happened to be alone, so we talked for some time about our respective programs and then strayed to sharing a little of the paths that had led us to our current jobs. I off-handedly mentioned that I was getting a divorce and that the working hours my job required were convenient for my child and me, as we would be beginning life on our own. The sound of those words emanating from my mouth surprised me. Later, while locking the office door, I spoke aloud to myself: “There. You’ve said it. Now go do it,” and that night I told my husband I was going to file for the divorce. We had tried. Counseling had helped, our marriage was somewhat better, but it was not the way I wanted to live the rest of my life. My days of being an IBM salesman's wife were over.

Just before leaving my suburban split-level for the last time, I made two discoveries. In a paper bag under some things in a closet, torn to shreds, was my favorite dress. It was one I’d made of a blue handkerchief cotton print, a dress I'd worn to usher for a local summer stock theatre, my counselor-suggested "independent activity" that left my husband home to baby-sit and gave me an occasional night out. The other discovery was something hidden above my head on top of the kitchen cupboards: his wedding ring, the one he’d told me he must have lost when emptying the trash.

About two years later I married the man who had stopped in my office on January 3, 1971, the stranger who heard me mention off-handedly that I was getting a divorce. We celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary last fall, but of course that is another story.

An Evening's Photographs

In town, the photo op was man-made and peopled: four ballerinas were enjoying some fresh air on the fire escape of an upstairs ballet studio.

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.................................Pas de Fire Escape


A few minutes later and a few miles away, I encountered a subject of an entirely different sort:
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...............................................Sun and Barn Sinking
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And by nightfall, the moon and a planet were sharing secrets in a darkening sky:
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............................................Sky Companions
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Good night!
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