In May, my husband and I went to the Rock Shoppe in Plymouth, Michigan to find some stones for the edging of the pond in the back yard. It was a sunny spring day and we were wandering the extensive grounds looking for just the right thing – kind of greenish slate tiles. We went into a more remote fenced area with less foot traffic, and an insistent bird got our attention. He was on the ground near one of the bins of rocks, maybe 10 feet away from us. He chirped at us, seeming to stamp his foot to tell us to move along. He stood his ground, staring at us.
CVNP – Killdeer Protecting Nest, originally uploaded to Flickr by Andrew 94.
Both the male and the female kildeer incubate the pair’s eggs. According to this description from Audubon, only the female tries her classic wounded wing act to distract us from her nest. The male exhibits more of a stay-and-fight defense. As he stood there, glaring, I was able to spot the nest of spotted eggs in the gravel road of the rock yard, a few inches from his toes (this is not my photo, but it is a nice one!).
I thought about how ridiculous it was. A 6-inch tall bird was having a face-off with two 6-foot humans! We meant no harm, but it is possible in our obliviousness we might have blundered into the nest. His chirp was a clear warning, and he seemed fearless and confident. How apt is his Latin name Charadrius vociferus.
We turned away, and as we left, he settled back on his nest.
Papa kildeer – may your babies be as fierce as you and live long.
I just finished Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front. It’s at least in part an eco-survivalist guide to finding your way in peak oil, climate change, and the forecasted hard times that will come from energy crisis. I don’t agree with it entirely, I have to say that I’m not as doom-and-gloom as she is (perhaps just my denial kicking in), but I appreciated several sections of her book.
One section which inspired me to rethink was her description of the mobility of Americans – apparently we move once every five years on average. Given we’re transitory and perhaps expect future transitoriness, we don’t consider our relationship with our own yards in the way we might if we anticipated a lifelong relationship with the place. Just using the word “yard” seems less intimate and less nurturing than using the word garden, even though these two words have a common origin. Yard seems to be about what it stores (brickyard, lumberyard) where a garden evokes what it grows. Garden is clearly more creative and sustaining in my mind.
That struck me as a strong contrast to, say, a book I read last summer, The Lost Upland: Stories of Southwestern France, in which the first story chronicled someone weeding and reclaiming an ancient garden plot, thinking of the folks who gardened there before. That whole book seemed permeated with a longstanding relationship to the land, though it in part elegized it.
One of the reasons I stopped writing about being green was because I was moving to a bigger house on a bigger lot. And, the other day, when I came out the side door and encountered a bed of peonies in full bloom that I didn’t plant, hadn’t tended, and didn’t even notice in bud, I said to myself “what have I done to deserve this.” The peony blooms shocked me. And I was grateful to the previous owner (not sure which, the prior residents were there for only one year) who put that in for me to enjoy today.
Although there was a fair bit of doom and gloom in the start of Astyk’s book, the depletion part, she did have a clear vision for abundance. Astyk advocates adapting in place, avoiding the cost and waste of razing the current infrastructure, by retrofitting our homes for increased energy efficiency, planning for intergenerational and more collaborative living, and cultivating gardens to increase our self-sufficiency. She’s envisioning a future of suburbia filled with familes and neighbors cultivating the eco-equivalent of Victory gardens. A sweet vision.
So, maybe I don’t have to feel quite so terrible about the lovely garden and the land we’re enjoying. I benefitted from the past investment of the prior inhabitants of my house. For our part, we’ve put in a small garden bed holding lettuce, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, and shallots so far. We will add additional kitchen garden terraces in other years. Next, we will invest in longer term items such as fruit- and nut-bearing trees and bushes, inspired by a visit and a rough plan by Nature and Nurture. I’d like to stay where we are for a long time, and plan for abundance.
Things have been tense, and when they’re tense I’m drawn inward, away from the stress and complexity of other people.
I feel like every where I turn I am hearing someone talk about writing – friends are turning towards writing books, I’m picking up books published by friends, a quick trip in my car gives me an opportunity to hear an NPR interview where a writer discusses the transformative value of fiction in our troubled world, a man pays to translate an Israeli autobiography into Arabic to honor his son, mistakenly killed in the conflict. Everywhere I turn, it seems, there is a theme of writing, of transformation. Writing underscores our common humanity by letting us into each other’s minds and hearts.
Yet I’ve resisted the aloneness that writing requires, and I’m not sure if it is for me. I did have a chance to be a more solitary scholar after my dissertation, and I found it too solitary and too abstract.
With this spinning in my mind, I attended a recent reading by Jeffrey Eugenides in Detroit. He’s a creative writing professor at Princeton University, my alma mater, and the local alumni organization invited him to speak. He read a few passages from Middlesex and told a colorful story of the diversity of disciplines housed at the Princeton University Lewis Center for the Arts, including creative writing, dancer, visual art, and theater.
His story was vivid and wry, and the playful contrast he drew between the writers (whose work was dragging them more deeply into their interiors and removing their social graces) and the dancers (whose work was making them even more beautiful than they already were, bringing a flush to their cheeks) only reinforced that impression.
In the question and answer period, when asked about his writing process, Eugenides said that he was not particularly talented (tho I might disagree) but he was stubborn. He said that the only thing a writer needed was sitzfleisch, the skin you keep next to the chair to keep writing. Of course, the dancers have their version of sitzfleisch, it just doesn’t keep them attached to a chair. He said writing teachers know which of their students has talent, but not which will succeed, because success takes (superhuman, in my opinion) persistence.
All (all!) it takes is the capacity to sit and stare at the computer screen, or typewriter, or legal pad, and tell the story. Middlesex took nine years.
Ah, spring. The trees are ablaze with blooms, the ponds are abuzz with frog calls, the mornings come earlier, and the evenings last longer. Time to shake off the drowse and inwardness of winter and stand, blinking, in the sunshine. At least, when it isn’t spring showers, then maybe stand under an eave, or stand right out in the soft rain, as long as you don’t have to be dry at your next stop.
I am enjoying the blossoms of spring. I am also writing again. Some of the quietness on the blog was from my own misalignment – in the year I announced I was going to write about greener living, my husband and I started house shopping for a larger place, farther from town. Oops.
Now, I’m just over 2.5 miles from my work, and I can bike to work, and if I walk or drive 1 mile, I can also bus it downtown. But, moving to a bigger house in a neighborhood without sidewalks and no corner store, I couldn’t blog about being green without, well, lying, and I stopped writing. And then we packed and moved, and I was busy with work and the distracting buzz in my head and body that comes with change. Oh yeah, and a surgeon opened me up and took out something (non-malignant) that should not have been there in December.
Excuses, excuses.
This isn’t meant to be an excuse post, but instead a flag of something new. After all of that change and resettling, I feel different.
I loved the old place – it was the happiest most lovely place I’d ever lived, happiest most loving person I’d ever been, and I didn’t want to risk leaving behind any of that well being. I was also thrilled to walk to work….while I could theoretically walk the six mile round trip to and from work from our new place, I haven’t yet. Other changes, after a lifetime of tea drinking, I am experimenting with coffee (er, a milky mocha that has a dash of coffee, not the straight espresso enjoyed by my dear husband). But, something about going under anesthetic and losing a piece, moving house, and changing your caffeine vehicle has triggered a reassessment. I am, in essence, reading my own tea leaves and pondering the future. This happens to me periodically.
Exhibit A of many – “R” is for “Rebecca” mini-sweater ornament
Maybe because I was sedentary, I spent a fair bit of my free time this winter knitting. Socks, scarves, purses…my Christmas gifts to the women in my family were homemade. I made small ornaments for my niece and nephew. I ended up with some gift yarn from a colleague, I had several of my own projects to complete. I knit and knit and knit.
But now, facing warmer weather, when the thought of wool in my lap is a bit less appealing, I’m questioning all of that knitting. How many scarves can one person wear? Maybe more socks than scarves, but the cost of the yarn plus the hours of work…means the socks end up being multiply expensive. I’m happy to knit, and I’m even happy to spend a little on quality yarn for my free time, but I started to wonder what all of that knitting was doing for me. What I was expressing or replacing by knitting.
After some quiet pondering, I remembered what I already knew, that it is satisfying a creative urge, one that I’m having trouble satisfying at work. Interestingly enough, this has been a theme that I’ve pondered before. OK, ok, I get it. Time to make a change in my job description to get a little more creative during my day job, let’s see if that calms the knitting drive.
I’m pretty much unable to draw, though I doodle a lot when I’m thinking. Photography has been my visual outlet, and I’ve long loved taking photographs and sharing photographs with friends and family.
It took me a long time to give up my film camera, but when I converted to digital, it was permanent and now my old film SLR just sits there. I used to print lots of doubles of photographs to share with friends, but with digital files, I simply upload my photos and use Flickr to host my “photo albums.” My bookshelf of photo albums abruptly ends at that point, and now all my recent photo album holds is photo Christmas cards from friends and family featuring their kids. I enjoy the ease of sharing photos online, and given the loss of a few hard drives, I value that Flickr is storing my photos for me off-site.
Until recently, my online photo album caused no angst. I don’t have kids and haven’t acquired a stalker so I feel unperturbed about hosting personal photos online. But, an interesting thing just happened to remind me that my personal photo album is public, and therefore not entirely mine.
It took me a while to notice the add person to photo link in Flickr. But I love tagging things, so when I did notice, I immediately thought of some photos that I had uploaded that had other Flickr members featured (this feature is less interesting for non-Flickr members). At that point, I went on a tagging spree and labeled them.
I received a response that I should have anticipated. In my tagging frenzy, I’d tagged a friend in a photo I’d taken several years ago. In my photo, she’s seated with a man with whom she’d had a stormy relationship. Flickr had dutifully emailed her that I’d tagged her in a photo, and she had probably gone to look and perhaps been surprised by the reminder of that relationship.
She wrote:
I got this message via flickr. Would you be willing to remove this photo from your page. [NAME] is in it and I would like to look at your site without being reminded of him.
What’s interesting to me about her note is that:
That photo had been online on Flickr for several years, and she probably saw it when I first shared it with her after the event, but since the photo was buried underneath several years of more recent photos, it was below her notice until I tagged her and Flickr notified her.
Once it was tagged, it was not only more obvious to her, but it was also more findable by anyone looking for information on her online (a current love interest, a parent)…
My response was complicated. I realized I had been thoughtless and may have caused her pain, and I felt like a bad friend. At the same time, I was reluctant to remove the photo, even though I had had a negative interaction with her ex that very day, because he was part of my memory of the event and the image was within what I considered my personal photo album. Additionally, since Flickr is my photo file storage application, and the photo was taken at least one hard drive crash ago, I didn’t even know if I had a copy of the file on my computer anymore.
It’s odd to me. I didn’t even like the guy, so it should have been fine to delete the photo, but that didn’t feel fine. In my mind, my Flickr site is mine first, and shared second, but, of course, that’s not how anyone else experiences it. And, the adding people functionality made that tension more apparent. My compromise in this case was to keep the photo on Flickr, but to label it private, so it was no longer visible to her and was not findable by anyone else.
Note – in 2019 given flickr’s new owner’s change to the terms of use, I’ve moved my photos to Google Photos, so my flickr archive is much, much smaller now.
We moved into a new place in August. For a while there we were almost camping because we had the kitchen ripped out…it didn’t feel exceptionally homey.
Our fabulous Ann Arbor construction crew gave us a working kitchen in our bump out just before Thanksgiving. We moved our plates, spices, glasses, and cookware into the kitchen the weekend before family arrived from Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
And, then, with the help of Dave’s family cooking at the house, china plates from my family, delivered a few days ahead so we could wash them, mashed potatoes and appetizers from Fenton, sweet potatoes from Kalamazoo, and ambrosia fruit salad from Rochester Hills, we had a great meal. The place was full – we had fourteen for Thanksgiving dinner. Six from the “Greiling” (Johnson) side: my aunt and uncle, my cousin and her family of four (hubby, two kids, and one on the way), and three on the “Bondy” (Sopt) side.
And, because of lovely memories and shared traditions, several more people were there in spirit. My Grandmother Greiling, whom I never met, shared her china with us. Grandma Higbie’s pie safe held the desserts, and Dave’s Grandfather Bondy contributed beautiful flower arrangements. I wore pearls my father gave me, and a bracelet from my mother.
I am thankful for everyone who blessed our home that day – to inaugurate our kitchen and celebrate with us. Now, finally, after a few months in the house and a handful of days in the new kitchen, the new place feels like home.
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