Re-entry...

Changing realities is a little bit like changing gears the first time you drive a standard: grind... clunk... lurch... and then things are reasonably smooth again. For me, it's easier to up-shift than to down-shift.

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View from the Taconic Parkway west toward the Catskills

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The excitement of a trip to New York builds along with the frenzy of packing and getting the home front in order before blast-off, and it continues to increase along with the traffic after we cross one range of mountains, skirt the edge of a second, and see the first "Sprain Brook Expressway" and "George Washington Bridge" signs in Westchester County. By the time we've sped along with the taxis, cars and delivery trucks on the FDR Drive down the western length of Manhattan, our pulses and attitudes are beginning to fit right in with the natives. Coyote howls and stillness are already unimaginable.

After delivering my husband's mother to the W Hotel downtown, we headed up 3rd Ave. (past the site of the previous day's steam pipe explosion) and found our son's new office. He gave us his apartment key and directions to a great nearby cafe, and after a fabulous salad, we choked on the cost of leaving our car underground for a little more than an hour and headed for the Brooklyn Bridge.

Brooklyn is a borough in transition. It's also huge and comprised of many neighborhoods, some gentrified and some still affordable to those blue-collar workers who keep Manhattan functioning. Our son's place is a co-op apartment in an 1850s church, this in an area of brownstones with small front gardens surrounded by wrought-iron fencing. Lovely trees line the streets and shade the homes; cafes and shops are within easy walking distance, and this weekend there were stoop sales and a nearby Saturday block party. A few blocks south, Spanish is the predominant language.

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Part of a magnificent garden in front of an old graffiti-covered building
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Our trip's purpose was to attend the wedding of a nephew, and that we did on Friday night. It was black-tie in an elegant hotel. It was swank, the food was fabulous, and it was FUN. We danced to a great band (you should have heard them belt out "Respect"), women gradually shedding shoes and men shedding jackets until the early morning hours when even the young among us were flagging.
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The next day we walked around Brooklyn, starting with breakfast on the roof of a Mexican restaurant.

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View of Lower Manhattan from the Mexican restaurant in Brooklyn

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From there we walked to an amazing new grocery market on the waterfront,

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Looking west from the market

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bought some fruit, and then hopped a bus back up toward Prospect Park. More walking, and then onto the grass and pathways winding past one group after another repeating the hundred-year-old summer ritual of a family picnic or barbeque in the wilds of a city park.

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Two of several kites above Prospect Park

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My feet were worn down to nubs by the time we walked back down toward the apartment, and although we had planned to eat at one of the many new restaurants in Brooklyn, we were still so sated from the previous evening's feast that we called a fabulous frozen yogurt (with fresh fruit) "dinner" and went to bed early.

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A small rock beside a trail in Prospect Park
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On Sunday morning, Starbucks and Whole Foods supplied breakfast before we piled into the Prius and headed north. The trip is a pretty one with little traffic after the first thirty miles or so, and we broke it up with a dinner stop in an old Adirondack hotel on Long Lake.

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After dinner beside Long Lake

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For several miles, puffy clouds reflected amazing shades of orange and pink, and then we drove in darkness. It was around 10:30 when my husband dropped me off at the end of our road and then continued on to return his mother to her home-away-from-home in the town about twelve miles north. (She, by the way, was absolutely mortified as I stepped out of the car into the darkness in what she thought to be the absolute middle of nowhere, a place lurking with sharp-fanged wild beasts).

I walked the mile up the road through the woods by the light of a half-moon low in the sky, here and there listening to the scuttling of an animal or the breaking of a twig in the darkness, buttoning my sweater up against the cool of the night air. I do have to admit that about a quarter of a mile from home the nearby and unexpected shrill snort of a deer scared the bejeezus out of me! A note just inside the door greeted me with news that Heidi's eye seems to be healing nicely, and both horses had been fed.

And so today I look at the garden with its new crop of weeds, the barn with its fresh supply of manure, what passes for our lawn at a new high, a house with an empty refrigerator and a pile of dirty laundry; I do as little as possible and plunk myself down here at my keyboard.

(Down-shift! Toe-heel the brake and accelerator! Down-shift! Now, put it in low gear and begin slowly... ) It was a great trip and fun to be a city person for a short time, but very soon I will be back in the happy swing of my peace and quiet and dirt and work. Right now, though, I need just a little while to idle my engine.

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Update:

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The patient is improving, i.e. the eye swelling has gone down considerably. I made a cloth pad and sewed it inside her fly mask to put some space between the mask and the wound, and that is working out well. Her vision is fine and she doesn't seem to be in any discomfort. The big question now is whether the cut will heal together, or, more likely, how much of a gap will be left in the edge of her upper eyelid. You see, a previous (worse) injury has already left this eye susceptible to problems.

How it happened is the million dollar question. There are trees in the pasture, some with sharpish branches; also some pretty thorny boysenberry brambles. I am extremely careful with nails and fence wire, going to great lengths to bend any loose wire ends into non-sharp tiny loops. There is no barbed wire, only smooth electric fence. My suspicion is that she did it on the handle of her grain bucket. It is hung in her stall, and some time ago she whomped into it and bent the handle somewhat. It looks to me that there is a very slight protrusion of the metal handle where it attaches to the bucket, and there was some blood on the stall partition quite near it. ? I'll never know, but I have replaced the bucket.

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This horse needs to wear a helmet. She is very "heady" (can send you flying if you don't watch out for her), often making sudden swings of her head or trying to rub an itchy spot. She doesn't know her own strength and assumes I am a scratching post. If something startles her, she could easily bang her head and possibly cause a tear like the one we're dealing with now.

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One sweet aside: she's loving all the attention. I gently massage her eye before putting the ointment in it. That gets her relaxed and she closes it, which is the only way I can sneak the medicine in. Yesterday when I finished giving one of the doses, she nibbled on my shoulder in an affectionate gesture.

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.......................................Heidi's "good" eye last winter

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Heidi is supposedly half Morgan and half Quarterhorse. I do not see the latter (and in fact think maybe there's a bit of the Budweiser Clydesdale in her family tree), but she does have the Morgan "hot-bloodedness" which can make for excitement. Imagine a 1000 pound fraidy-cat... If anything startles her, you must be ready to jump out of her way in a hurry. She's kind hearted, but a bit of a squirrel.

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Time will tell, but so far she's making reasonably good progress in healing.

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Thanks to all of you who have expressed concern. I appreciate your kind words. Heidi would thank you too if she could. Maybe you could stop by and be nibbled.

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............................A roll in the pasture last month

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"Oh oh... now they'll think I just sit around all day..."

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.............................Heidi relaxing in the pond on a hot day
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Murphy's Law of Trips
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It's the way things go. You plan a trip, or maybe you have to go on a trip because it's a holiday or somebody you're closely related to is getting married, and that trip becomes the "deadline" by which time a great many things have to be accomplished. (There's the reverse of "THE TRIP" which is called "The Date the City Relatives Arrive for a Visit," but that's a different story).
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The pasture fence must be secured. If it was fine last week, you can bet an animal has gone through it or a limb has fallen on it since then. One early morning several years ago, as we rushed to put our suitcases in the car in time to reach an airport three hours away, we discovered a dead deer hopelessly tangled in the pasture fence, and besides the sadness of that tragedy, there was added to the "to-do-before-we-leave" list the physical effort of wire cutting, fence repair, and dragging the animal to the road (where within ten minutes he was mistaken for road-kill and hauled away by someone who would use the meat).

The garden must be pest-proofed, and even if you just strung the electric raccoon fence, on the morning of departure you can be sure to discover that the raccoons have found some way in that must be plugged before you leave if you plan on filling the freezer with corn this year.

Plumbing knows your plans; so do blizzards and thunderstorms. Kids schedule ear infections or bronchitis to coincide with blast-off, and pets... well, pets... is what this story is about.

You can take a dog to the kennel, leave a cat for a couple of days with lots of food and a big litter box, farm out a hampster or other small critter to friends, but you have to have someone come to your barn twice a day to look after a horse. My barn is set up so the horses can each come and go at will from their box stalls. Water is outside in a tank and will last a week between fillings; grain can be put in their buckets and hay can be thrown into the stalls while keeping a stall wall between the horse and the caretaker of the horse (eliminating the risk of being stepped on or kicked). It's a good set-up.

So far so good.

This Thursday we leave to attend a wedding in New York, and so today I went out to the barn to muck out the stalls and throw some bales of hay down from the loft. At my appearance, Dream began her usual pawing and nickering in anticipation of the morning scoop of grain. I quickly obliged and then scooped for Heidi. As I approached the second stall, I saw it: Heidi's eyelid was ripped, swollen and encrusted with dried blood and dirt.

From experience that I will write about some other time, I knew that nothing could be done at this point except prevent infection. I washed Heidi's eye and called the vet, feeling deja vu: deja vu of Passover time and of a horse going lame with an abcess; deja vu of another horse having to be put down the day before Thanksgiving.

The vet came and agreed that antibiotic ointment was all that could be done, and that doing it three or four times a day between now and our departure may be enough. In New York City as the groom and bride raise their glasses in a toast to health and happiness, I will celebrate, but I will also think of Heidi and hope for the best.

Sometimes I wonder if Murphy didn't like animals.

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I thank some of you readers for encouraging my writing. Here is another true story, but of course the names have been changed to protect the people involved.
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Illegal
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They met on a dark road in the middle of the night, a pre-arranged headlight signal marking the transfer point. Pierce’s pulse quickened as his truck wheels slowed, and worrisome thoughts raced through his brain, but so far everything was going just as he had been told it should. Arturo, riding shotgun, stared quietly with wide and nervous eyes.

The truck rolled close, nose to back-end of the van in the manner of two horses doing mutual fly-control, and before Pierce could come to a complete stop, the door of the van opened quietly, a small shadowy occupant was ejected, and then it was gone, disappearing into the night in less time than it took the young man on the pavement to clamber into the cab of the pick-up. As if someone had screamed, “Drive like hell!” at him, Pierce wheeled the truck around and sped north.

There was an embrace, an outpouring of questions and answers, the laughter of relief as they realized the mission appeared to be accomplished. The two young men talked excitedly in Spanish, faster than Pierce could speak it but not so fast that he couldn't understand the news from “home” and the details of the journey.

It had all gone without a hitch. La mamá había llorado, but her tears were proud and hopeful. The first miles were unremarkable, then the crossing of the border and the transport to Phoenix was accomplished, and finally the 2500 mile van ride east and north. For a young man not yet seventeen years old it was an adventure that gave both pride and more than a little worry, but the network was experienced and efficient, and he had made it. Miguel expressed sorrow for others like himself who didn’t have an older brother awaiting them, or who, like his friend Pedro, had been intercepted, arrested and sent back.

They reached the farm an hour later, the darkness beginning to give way to dawn’s early light, and Arturo proudly led his younger brother up the stairs to the apartment Pierce had fashioned above the milk house. It was small, but there were amenities both boys had lacked in the shantytown outside of Hermosillo. Miguel was awed by his new "home" with its shower and flush toilet and thought how he would work hard to prove his worth. Milking cows would all be new to him, but he was eager to become a wage-earner, and so far his impressions of his new employer were living up to the descriptions Arturo had shared in their frequent cell phone conversations.

In the morning almost upon them, Miguel would be introduced to the Amish family who were also employed by the farm, to the large herd of Holsteins, and he would gaze out over fields more lush than any he could have imagined from his home in Mexico. He understood that he must not leave the confines of the farm for fear of being recognized as an “illegal” and picked up by the Border Patrol or State troopers who regularly patrol this south side of the Canadian border, and Miguel accepted that condition. Six hundred acres and your own apartment was a lot of space.

Resting on their beds, tired but running on adrenalin, the young Mexican brothers wondered how it could be that there were no Americans wanting to do this work.

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Arturo and Miguel have the good fortune of working for kind-hearted people who can speak their language. They continue to work on the farm (and they are excellent workers), send their pay back to Mexico and appreciate these jobs that no one else wanted. Like most of the hispanic workers employed on our local dairy farms, they plan to return to "Hermosillo" when they have earned enough money to begin a decent life in their home country.

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The Great Bank Robbery

.....(This is a re-run of a piece from the early days of this blog. At that time, nobody was reading anything by some wizened wizard in the enchanted forest, so I'm re-posting this true story because it's a good one and you no doubt missed it the first time around, and because instead of writing, I do have to clean out the barn today.)

It was a hot summer afternoon in Potsdam, a lazy college town that had turned its students and teachers out to summer pasture. The merchants were complaining about things being “slow” (as they always did at that time of year), yet they, like everyone else, were secretly enjoying the quiet of the off-season. Then it happened: The Great Bank Robbery of 1987.

It certainly wasn’t on anybody’s list of expected occurrences, so the robbers had the advantage of surprising the employees of Community Bank’s tiny satellite location. While they had the element of surprise on their side, they had the distinct disadvantage of being the only three black men in a white Cadillac convertible within probably a hundred miles, and that in a county full of rednecks in pickup trucks.

The local police quickly jumped into action, although they weren’t exactly sure what sort of action they should jump into. By 2:00, Alfred, the town’s one black businessman, had been arrested twice by two different State Troopers, only to be immediately recognized by the local chief and turned loose, his apologies to Alfred gradually morphing into a string of expletives aimed at the visiting forces.

The police did manage to set up roadblocks while the robbers were driving around town trying to decide which way to leave. It would later be learned that they had come to Potsdam on the invitation of a local professor who hoped to do them some social good, but apparently they were in such a hurry to make the most of the opportunity presented that they hadn’t bothered to get their bearings. Someone reported seeing the trio studying a map in the hospital parking lot shortly after the commission of the crime.

At 3:00, Alfred was arrested again, freed again, and decided he might as well go home for the rest of the day.

Lost, confused and road-blocked, the robbers eventually decided to ditch the car and make their get-away on foot. The Cadillac was found at the south side of town, on the north edge of the great swamp.

Meanwhile, the local coffee counters were a-buzz with speculation as “Three men and a Cadillac” began to take on gangland proportions. Not everyone, however, had heard the news. Irv Thompson, high-school English teacher, was home relaxing in blissful ignorance of the excitement... in his house bordering the swamp...

News of The Event reached Vic Jarvis early in the day. He was the proprietor of Vic’s Barbershop and Figure Skating Leotard store, and one after another his clientele wasted no time in giving him the scoop. “Just in case,” Vic set his scissors aside, took his pistol out of storage and placed it in readiness for any would-be robbers. He’d never had any black men come looking for haircuts (or leotards, for that matter), so he figured he’d know them for what they were if three came knocking on this afternoon. Maybe it was the latent figure skater in him, maybe it was just good common sense, but Vic was nervous.

When the location of the found Cadillac was announced, Vic’s fears reached panic proportions. He grabbed the gun, flipped over the “OPEN” sign, jumped in his car and sped south. Although he didn’t know it, Vic reached Irv’s place about the time the first of the bank robbers quietly and peacefully gave himself up.

Bursting into his friend’s living room, gun in hand, alternating frantic questions concerning Irv’s well-being with excerpted news bulletins, Vic made an immediate and profound impression. The idea was that Irv should have the gun to protect himself; an idea punctuated by the deafening blast it made as Vic endeavored to show Irv that it was safe because it wasn’t loaded.

The town’s memory of that eventful day has faded with time. The fate of the bank robbers and their collegiate co-conspirator is forgotten by most of us these years later – most of us except maybe Alfred who still shakes his head in wonder at honky stupidity, and Irv and Vic who occasionally look at a hole in the fireplace mantle and chuckle at how lucky they both were when the shot was fired.

This is a true story. I have changed the names, and 1987 is my best guess at which year these events actually took place.

Pedicure
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Every eight weeks, my horses get a pedicure. They seem to enjoy it, or at least they enjoy the change in routine and the attention. My farrier, Dick, is a calf-roper and he and his wife are co-owners/managers of a barn that is currently housing fifty head of horses. They have an indoor arena where they give riding lessons and host clinics. The chaw of tobacco in his mouth and his cowboy style hide the fact that he's the son of a kindergarten teacher and a county legislator. He's bright, loves a good joke and hasn't much use for Republicans. He's also very kind and gentle in all his dealings with horses.
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First Dick uses snippers to clip off most of the new hoof growth. It's like using a nail clipper on your toenails (but you need a bit more strength). If you click on the picture, it will enlarge somewhat.
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Next, he files the hard edge he just snipped to smooth it and make it uniformly even.
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After the hoof is clipped and filed, he measures to be sure it has the proper angle. When he's satisfied that the horse is correctly balanced, Dick uses a sharp farrier's knife to pare off excess sole and trim the frog (that's the V-shaped area in the above photo). He'll file around the hoof , rounding the edge slightly before applying some Thrush-X to help prevent any hoof rot that might be starting. In a dry summer, that usually isn't necessary unless he has found an injury.
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It was a special day at the barn because Becky stopped by to watch. For some reason, Heidi seemed more interested in her than Dick did, but then, this horse-work is serious business.
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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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