We’re Having Some Weather Here

I watched the news come in on Monday about the tornado that drove right through the city of Moore, OK with the same sick-at-heart feeling that I’m sure most people did.  It’s terrible to know that people are picking through homes blown to matchsticks for what few treasures and possessions weren’t shattered, drenched, burnt, or blown into Kansas.   To know that rescue workers are digging people out from under yards of rubble and aren’t always finding people unhurt, or even alive.  Two schools collapsed.  Two elementary schools!  Side Note: why don’t schools in Oklahoma have tornado shelters?  I mean, it’s Oklahoma, aren’t the presence of tornados pretty statistically likely?  My elementary school in Pennsylvania had a tornado shelter – though, honestly, it was a repurposed nuclear fallout shelter.

But as bad as I felt about what these people were going through part of me remained aloof.  This was a problem other people suffered, it was not a problem that affected me.  Here in the Finger Lakes you only have to worry about a few kinds of natural disaster.  There are storms, sure, and they can bring high winds, lots of rain, and lightning so it’s possible to have a tree fall on your house, to get your basement full of water, or worst of all, to get struck by lightning.  In the winter heavy snowfall can make driving impossible, lead to lost power if snow-laden trees fall over power lines, or if you haven’t kept up its maintenance, your roof could collapse.  All that stuff is bad, definitely.  I don’t want it to happen to me for sure.  But all the major types of natural disaster, flood, hurricane, tornado, wildfire, earthquake are uncommon to unknown here.  Sandy blew in some wicked weather, for sure, but our power didn’t even flicker.  Some homes built right near creeks might experience substantial flooding, but the watershed is so broken up and the lakes are capable of taking in such a large amount of water before rising that even homes built right on the lake see flooding but once or twice a century.  Damage is generally very localized.  A tree falling on a house cause damage and injury to one family, a tornado takes out a city of thousands.  I’m grateful for this aspect of the Finger Lakes.  I think it is an important thing to take into consideration when looking for a place to call home.

But I got a scary message yesterday, just a day after the Moore tornado.  It said there was a tornado watch for the tiny town I live in.  Uh-oh.  I call my husband who is driving home and he says he’s getting pelted with hail and is turning back until the storm subsides.  The tornado watch is upgraded to a warning.  While a watch indicates that conditions are favorable for a tornado to develop a warning means that someone has identified an actual tornado either in person or on radar.  A warning means take shelter now.  A warning is ignored at your own peril.

Peril?  I was just congratulating myself on choosing a tornado-free neighborhood and within a day a possible tornado is bearing down on my tiny community?  From my job, 45 minutes away (where it was sunny and clear all day), I kept obsessively refreshing the radar screen.  The bright red spot heading for my house was condensing into a smaller hot pink dot.  That seemed bad.  I texted my neighbors about the warning and they took shelter in their basement with their dog.  No one was around to scoop up my cats and take them to the basement though.  I was worried.  If our house was hit, would they get out of it alive?  If they got out would they come back?

By the time I got home the tornado warning had expired and we were left with a simple big thunderstorm.  No tornado seems to have touched down on our side of the lake, but there is some evidence that one might have after the storm crossed the lake (the storm was heading perpendicular to the lakes going from west to east) but the area is sparsely populated and good data is apparently hard to come by.  Our laundry that was hanging up to dry on the porch  was strewn about and some pots of plants had been knocked over, but overall we had been very lucky (as was our landlord, who had finished putting on a new roof on an adjacent home literally that morning).

I’m not sure what to take from this experience.  Obviously, I need a NOAA radio and to keep the cat-carriers somewhere easy for a neighbor to find.  But in the larger picture, should I worry about tornados?  Should I worry about other weather events that I haven’t experienced yet?  Will this experience make it harder for me to “otherize” problems that I haven’t specifically faced?

Have you ever experienced a tornado?  Is there advice you’d give on being prepared and reacting to such events safely?  Have you ever learned anything from either experiencing a tornado or other extreme weather event?

The Beginnings of a Garden

I’ve talked about gardening for a long time, basically since moving out of my parent’s house nigh near ten years ago.  But I’ve lived in a lot of apartments with little or no outside space, or space that got no direct sunlight.  And with cats, indoor gardening is a tough sell.  I can make the plants grow but they get nibbled down to stubs long before they are harvestable.  This year is different.  This year I committed myself to growing more than a couple pots of tomato plants.  This year I’m using straw bales.

Straw bales gardening is like raised bed gardening with less work.  You basically soak some straw bales throughly with water and a touch of organic fertilizer, wait a week or so, and start cutting holes in it to place your seedlings.  The seedlings grow using the decomposing straw as a substrate.  The straw’s decomposition creates warmth making your garden into the micro-est of micro-climates and encouraging warm weather growth in cool weather conditions.  The straw bales also retain moisture well and require less water to remain moist, a feature I especially appreciate since I water my garden with a bucket I fill in my bathtub and haul out to the backyard.  The fewer trips I have to make the better!

This is what my newly planted garden looks like.

There’s little cucumber shoots visible along the back of the first two bales and a little further on you can see pea shoots.  The dark lines down the closest two bales are coffee grounds and potting soil that I used to help hold down lettuce and carrots seeds that I sowed directly into the bales.  I didn’t want the seeds to migrate so deeply into the bales as I watered them that they’d never see the light of day again so I used the coffee grounds/potting soil mix as a sort of putty to fill in the cracks long enough for them to sprout.  This picture was taken about ten days ago right after I planted everything and they just started sprouting today.

Here is a close up of the pea sprouts, a noble set of seedling that survived repeated bouts of cat chomping.

Though nearly all the pea sprouts recovered from their adventure with Henry, the bean sprouts did not.  The upper left hand corner of the picture shows the only two of two dozen sprouts to survive.  I’m sure they will produce the most delicious beans though, now that they’ve endured the worst of their trials.

So far our garden has been chugging along in exactly the way it was promised to.  As it fills out and starts producing I’ll update here accordingly.

Oh koi, oh koi!

I’ve been threatening to go to the Lilac Festival in Rochester for more than a year now, having just missed it last year due to not yet living in New York (what a silly thing to let get in the way!).  Lilacs are my favorite flower, just squeaking past ranunculus for that special distinction.  My grandmother’s old house had two very large lilac bushes out front.  They were a classic lilac color, bright bluish-purple, and had such an abundance of flowers that the tops of the branches would be weighed down until they pointed straight to the ground.  My mother would cut armfuls of the blooms to dress our table and the smell of those flowers has stood for me as the absolute perfection of floral-ity.

This year we made it to the Lilac Festival on its very last day.  Unfortunately the lilacs had not complied with the festival’s scheduling and were notably past their peak bloom.  That’s ok, we made friends with some uncommon residents of the park.

These lovely koi fish are housed in the Conservatory in Highland Park.  The Conservatory has a number of non-plant residents, which greatly surprised me.  Two tortoises were housed in a bed of palm trees and at least a dozen red eared slider turtles lived in a water feature in the rainforest room.  Signs on all the doors leading into and out of the conservatory warned guests about the quails being underfoot, but I didn’t chance to see one myself.

The koi are very curious about anyone approaching their pond.  They clearly both could see us and understood that we were things like the things that fed them and showed appropriate interest in us.  Though we didn’t have any food for them they collected in our shadow.

Some of the koi were very large, several reaching more than a foot long.  This guy was the biggest and one of the most assertive, pushing other fish out of his way to stay as close to us as possible.

If you really wanted to see a sight with the fish, you could hold your hand over the water and wiggle your fingers.  That really convinced them that you had some goodies to share! This gal couldn’t wait to see what treats we had for her!

I think that koi bring out part of my inner cat.  I could sit there all day staring at them gliding through the water, quiet and placid within and without much like Mr. McGregor’s cat from Peter Rabbit.  I will be excited to return to the Lilac Festival next year whether or not the lilacs will be in bloom just so I can visit these new friends again.

An Obstruction of Notable Brilliance

Lots of things run out into the road here in the Finger Lakes.  Squirrels and deer, of course, but also a great number gophers and woodchucks.  There’s a fair share of raccoons; I once nearly ran over an entire family of raccoons who popped their little bandit-y faces up out of a drainage cover in the middle of the road just as I neared them.  Luckily, they stole away as quickly as their initially appeared.  Skunks are an all too common victim of car-strikes, it takes a week or two for the area around a dead skunk to lose its serious funk.  Foxes are more common than you’d think too, moving like a cat across the road in the falling dusk.  As for actual cats, there are plenty, though they usually stay out of the road itself, preferring to watch the traffic lazily from the other side of the right of way. Opossums show up occasionally and just once I saw a giant tortoise of some extraction patiently waiting to cross a busy street.  It was so large I first took it to be a dead deer on the side of the road until I got up closer and saw it swing its leathery neck around to watch my progress.  Its surprising size (and how it so quickly changed from struck deer to living reptile) made me cuss loudly and swerve my car to give it a generous berth.

But rarely does anything so lovely block easy passage down our quiet roads.

This is real treat.  I’ve seen this gentlebird before, with a little harem of two peahens in tow.  Today he was alone.

I hope his two ladybirds weren’t lost in the hard winter, but are nesting productively and comfortably nearby.  I believe these birds to be escapees from a local winery who acquired them for purely decorative purposes.  The photo below was the best I could get of his tail, even with the inducements of a creeping car and little beeps he refused to startle and display his proud feathers.

He eventually cleared the way, vacating the road entirely for the preference of the high grass.  I was sorry to lose the excuse for tarrying, a lovely thing such as this is a rare delight and well worth the few minutes postponement of my journey.

 

Reading is Fundamental

Teacher Appreciation Week has come and gone.  I missed it!  I have so many wonderful things to say about my own teachers and teachers like them.  You don’t think they’d mind taking the compliments I have to offer, even if they’re a week late, do you?  Nah, I don’t think they’ll mind either.

When I was contemplating my ten year anniversary as a vegetarian I started counting how many years I’ve been other things.  Two years as a New Yorker.  Five years as a wife. Nine years as a Johnnie.  Twenty years as a reader.

Jesus.  Twenty years.  Many hundreds of books, tens of thousands of printed pages, uncountable multitudes of magazines, newspaper articles, and blog posts have passed before my eyes.  I’ve made a life of the written word.  Books are the embodiment of my education, they codify my sense of identity, and create a sense of security and stability. You will rarely find me without at least one book on hand, often two or three if you count reference-type books.  Am I stuck waiting somewhere?  It’s ok, I have something to read.  I probably have something for you too, if you give me a chance to dig to the bottom of my bag.  I’ve been weighing myself down recently with Homer, Twain, and an Identification Guide to New York Birds (By Color).    There are five full-sized bookshelves in our apartment, all full and overflowing.  That doesn’t even take into account the piles of books that slowly develop.  A stack on the nightstand, one beside the bathtub, a stack of cookbooks in the kitchen that is just three too high – I’m always picking up those top three after they slide off, and one by the back door where I unceremoniously chuck finished books and grab another off the shelf as I head out the door to work.

It all started innocently enough.  Phonics worksheets.  Sight words.  Homophones.  The complicated tangle of literacy was slowly unwound by my first grade teacher, Miss Appelt.  Having been responsible for teaching pre-literacy skills, I can attest that reading is not an easy skill to teach.  It can be quite frustrating for children and teacher alike.  But I don’t recall ever getting frustrated or fed-up with the process.  I barely remember the actual learning at all, it occurred just as I passed from the personal dark of early childhood to school-age awareness.  But Miss Appelt must have done a good job, and I am magnificently grateful for it.  I entered first grade being able to “read” only the Amelia Bedelia books I had learned by heart, but entered second grade with fingers itching to get ahold of the elementary Holy Grail of literature, “chapter books.”

Where Miss Appelt gave me the tools of literacy my second grade teacher, Ms. Sanderson, taught me how to build a home with them.  Everything about that class focused on books. She read book aloud to us.  We read books together as a class.  She encouraged everyone to read on their own.  Her enthusiasm for reading was contagious.  Second grade is where I first learned to prop a book open under my desk to read surreptitiously.  When we did a social studies unit on Native Americans and we all got “Indian” names (I know that this is obviously a very Euro-centric and insensitive approach now, but I suspect most students at that time did something similar) I was dubbed “She-who-reads-a-lot.”  

My early elementary school teachers gave me the one-two punch of literacy, capacity and passion.  Two decades later I still hold them in the highest-esteem and remember their lessons with gratitude and just a little bit of awe.  Who would I have been without their influence?  Not the person I am today, for sure.

Thank you, Miss Appelt and Ms. Sanderson.  Thank you, thank you, and thank you again!

A Life in Proper Ratio

I read yesterday that the average time a woman spends in labor appears to have increased by more than two full hours since the 1950′s.  Whoa.

Many things take us longer to get around to these days.  Young adults are waiting longer to get married and to have children.  Older folks are pushing retirement into later decades of life and our last breath has statistically stretched itself a little further from our first breath.

Since our life is longer now than what our ancestor’s used to be, could labor length have increased in proportion?

A Season Past

That long, brutal winter of the Finger Lakes I told you about in the last couple posts?  There are some pretty interesting aspects of it too.  One of the neatest being the drop in the level of the lake.  When the water level drops by two or three feet it’s pretty amazing what gets revealed.

This is a boat launch, where we usually put the kayaks into the lake.  At this water level it seems like a bad idea.  Whooosh….crunch!

This ladder usually usually underwater to the bottom-most step.  Over the winter it stays high and dry.  It does come in handy for climbing down to and back from the now hard-to-access shoreline.  The lake, when at its normal level, is easy to jump in and out of but without the help of buoyancy and weighed down by heavy winter coats and boots, the winter lake does pose some difficulties in navigating.

The creek that has cut the gorge we live in ends here.  Now that Cayuga’s returned to its standard water level this whole area is navigable by kayak almost into the underpass itself.  Oh, you say, so the shoreline has gained six or seven feet in the winter freeze?  Not that impressive.

Here’s the view from the opposite direction.  At this particularly shallow part of the shore the shoreline has gained a good fifteen or twenty feet.  The force of the creek’s water has piled up tiny shells and rocks to the side, extending the creek far into the lake’s usual boundaries.  Now there is no evidence of these temporary shores, spring thaws and the flood that follows washed them out.

One thing really surprised me though, finding numerous, tiny, blue claws like this:

There are crabs in the lake?  Before coming across their tiny dismembered corpses I had never heard about these little guys making a home in our front yard.  I’m sorry I didn’t know about them while they were still kicking (or pinching).  I will definitely be wearing shoes next time I go swimming though.  It’s not through a painful big toe that I want to get to know the next generation!

Orange Cecelia and Grass-Oriented Needs

When I was a child I didn’t have imaginary friends.  I did however, have an imaginary alter ego.  Her name was Orange Cecelia, or sometimes Orange Ce-Sara, and she was orphan who lived in our backyard.

Miss Orange was very self-sufficient.  She harvested, cooked, and ate grass.  She wove clothes from grass.  She lived in a tent of grass.  Are you noticing a trend?  There wasn’t much else, other than grass, in our backyard.  I filled many play dishes with mounds of grass, pulled it up by the handful to sprinkle over my elephant slide as a mock-up of my grass tent, and patted it all over myself to mimic grass clothes.  As long as I concentrated on pulling up dandelions along with the grass I got no complaints from my parents.

I enjoyed being Orange Cecelia because she didn’t need any help.  I think it’s hard for young children to be so dependent on other people.  They don’t have any autonomy yet and can’t fulfill their most basic needs. Anyone who has spent time around kids knows that they often are frustrated by wanting to do things all by themselves that they just haven’t mastered yet. They can’t fix their own food, bathe themselves, or go anywhere outside their immediate surroundings.  They can’t communicate well, not being able to read or write, use a phone or the internet, and may even still speak poorly enough that only family members understand them.  But it’s not only frustrating to be so dependent for your entire life* but scary.  At any moment these people might leave.  Who would love you and make you cheerios?  Who would put you to bed and read you stories?  I think children understand, at a basic level, that their daily existence hinges on other people.

Orange Cecelia’s existence didn’t hinge on anyone else though, only on that year’s grass harvest.  She was free from the weight and worry that important people wouldn’t be there for her anymore.  She had freedom from being told what to do and not to do (except of course, don’t pull the grass from other people’s lawns, don’t put grass in your hair, only pull dandelions and not other flowers…).  She didn’t worry that without parents she’d be hungry, lonely, cold, or unloved.  She didn’t have parents, she was an orphan after all, and she was just fine.  She was obviously able to meet all her own grass-oriented needs.  Orange Cecelia’s life was her own and it was a relief to be her sometimes.  I hope that I identify this kind of behavior and imagining in my own kids,  I want to make sure that they have room in the house rules for these exercises in autonomy, both important for them at that moment and for their future development.

And so, ramps.  Obviously all that Orange Cecelia play has prepared me to yank leaves from the ground and enjoy eating them.  The four year old in me is absolutely tickled pink by the idea.  Does this mean I’m finally a grown-up?

*And extra frustrating because you don’t understand how you will grow up to be able to do these things later, did you ever notice how many books and t.v. shows for kids teach them about how they will grow and change? Children have only ever been children, it isn’t obvious to them that they will change and become adults, they have to be told, many times over, that it will happen.

On a Ramp-age

Winter is long in the Finger Lakes.  Very very long.  Snow, ice, and blustery winds keep us cooped up for the better part of six months.  By March you begin to question if you’ve been remembering it rightly, did you really go swimming in those icy depths?  Was there ever a time that you went without long underwear and wool sweaters?  Do these barren fields ever warm up enough to grow crops?  It seems impossible.

But warmth has finally returned!  The geese have left and the songbirds returned.  The lake has thawed out and is beginning to green along the bottom.  Our backyard, the bottom of one of the many gorges cutting through the landscape, has gone from bare woods and a clear forest floor to a shady, bug-buzzed, green carpeted glen.  In the woods I made a very exciting discovery, ramps.

Not ramps like inclines, but ramps like wild leeks.They don’t look like very much.  Not much to set them apart from their other leafy brethren in the undergrowth.

A closer look reveals the reddish stems, a good sign that your random leaves might belong in a pizza.  But ramps are a lot like green onions or leeks, the most identifiable portion of them is underground.  So if you give them a little yank…

…you’ll see the snowy white bulb that shows your definitely on the right track.

Ramps are in the alium family and related to both garlic and onions.  Predictably they have a mild flavor somewhere between those two aromatics.  The hard white bulb can be sliced or diced and cooked like onion while the broad leaf can be chiffon-cut and cooked lightly, like spinach.  Pulling these right from the wild means they are more organic than anything you could buy in the fanciest store, but it also means you are directly competing with spiders, slugs, and snails for first dips, so wash them well.

Maybe you’ve got ramps in your backyard as well?  Or can purchase them at a farmer’s market?  I used this recipe from Smitten Kitchen for Ramp Pizza.  Delish.

 

Good looking, no?

You might have noticed that I’m super stoked about hauling in some vegetables from the woods.  Vegetables that aren’t terribly different for ones that I can buy for a couple bucks year-round from my dear local Wegman’s.  Why?  Tomorrow, dear readers, I’ll tell you tomorrow.  (And it doesn’t have anything to do with that lovely pizza or the ramp calzones that followed the next day – mostly.)

More on Christians as Exiles

When writing about “Christians as Exiles” last week (here) I got to thinking more deeply about this subject.  I started wondering if any group of Christians were really living as exiles in this country.  Then I read this article  about a group of Catholics protesting the Catholic Church’s treatment of the LGBTQ community with the outrageous tactic of dirtying their hands and how they were turned away at the church door and told they needed to wash before entering the church.  Those good folks are exiles.

But you know who isn’t really an exile?  A white, straight, male Christian.  Not usually at least.  But I’ve had this line of a song, written by a a group of straight white dudes (the ones from Third Day who wrote the song “Alien” on the album Conspiracy No. 5), stuck in my head recently, “I am just like the alien, the fatherless, and the widow.”  No, I want to say to them, you’re probably not just like those people.  They’re not aliens, they live as people with fully realized constitutional rights who’s citizenship is not questioned on the basis of their skin color or accent.  They’re not widows, who in the context of this song stand for economically and socially marginalized women.  Members of the band might indeed be fatherless, and that’s sad.  But even if they lost a parent early in their lives, they were probably still decently cared for through their childhood and don’t face a society that shuns the bastard child.  Life can be tough and we all can feel like the lowest rung on the ladder sometimes.  That’s normal.  But to specifically identify marginalized and oppressed groups of people that by definition you can’t be part of and say you’re “just like” them is at best obnoxious and patronizing and at worst flatly offensive.

Listen, I’ve had bad days.  I’ve had times were I felt like no one listened to me or wanted to be my friend.  Days where people treated me badly for no good reason.  Days where I felt that I stood out or was judged for just being me.  But it would wildly inappropriate for me to say, “Today I felt really black because people judged me before they even spoke to me,” or, “Wow, I am like a gay person today, people keep giving me all these weird looks!”  I can’t say those things because I’m not black or gay.   I don’t actually know what it is like to have those experiences.  To speak from my position of privilege, as a straight white person, as if I did not possess those privileges denies the existence of those privileges and belittles the difficulties the non-privileged face.

However, facing difficult situations can make us better people and help us build our empathy muscles.  Identifying with other people, especially people who face greater challenges than yourself, can be an excellent opportunity to turn feelings into actions.  Having a feeling that you associate with a certain group of people is just a fact.  You feel this certain way and it reminds you of how you assume this group of people feels.  That’s uninteresting.  You know what would be interesting?  If your feelings changed your behavior.  Feeling like an alien?  You could resolve to show better hospitality to people who are not close friends or family.  You could donate money to refugee support charities.  You could write your legislators about passing immigration reform.  Feeling fatherless?  You could call your own dad or granddad or uncle for a long chat (you know they’d love to hear from you).  You could spend time with your own kids or grandkids or nieces and nephews to emulate what good parents look like.  You could volunteer some time in a mentoring program for kids who, for whatever reason, need an extra role model and friend in their lives.  Feeling like a widow?  You could spend some time with your own family members who have lost a spouse and lovingly remember them together.  You can invest money in micro-loans to empower woman-lead households to lift themselves from grinding poverty.  You could spend time just being with your own significant other and appreciate all the things you love about them.

The narrative of Christians as Exiles can lead to these strange scenarios where some of the most privileged people co-opt the difficulties faced by the least privileged on sketchy and forced theological grounds.  This is another dark side of this narrative.  But if Christians and non-Christians alike refuse to allow this narrative to continue in a way that disrespects and harms people we might be able to put it on a new track, one that leads to greater humility, empathy, and just actions.