The Tragedy of the Fish

Very soon after we moved into this house, we installed a big plastic cistern under our back porch -- the downpipes from half of our roof pour into the tank.  This was to help to slow down the water that flows down the hill (we are at the top of the hill) so our neighbors would not have a river running through their side yard. It is not enough, but it is something.  When the tank fills up, we open the valve at the bottom and let the water out slowly so it doesn't make a ravine.

But mosquitoes breed in standing water.  We knew that already and we had a plan -- Jon went to the pet store and bought one of those bags full of little goldfish.  They did the job.  There were never any mosquito larvae in our tank.  When Anna came to live here for a while, she got more fish and they became her pet project.  She bought fish food (we had never thought of that) and fed them often. 

The fish were extremely low maintenance.  We did nothing but empty the tank when it got too full.  They swam around and grew bigger, slowly.  There were 14 of them.  In the winter, the tank froze over and the fish went to sleep, we assume.  We never saw them in the winter.  In the spring they would wake up again and they had more elaborate fins and tails. They knew the routines of their plastic tank.  When it rained, they cavorted in the bottom of the waterfall that came from the downspout.  When we fed them, they came to the surface with alacrity.  When we didn't feed them, they didn't complain.

Occasionally we forgot and left the valve open too long and the water all went out, except for a few inches at the bottom, so they had a much smaller and murkier living environment.  Eventually it would rain and their house would expand magically.

But one day the tank overflowed and the water went down the basement steps, found the drain clogged, and went right into the basement. Ugh.  Jon cleaned up some but was daunted by the project of ripping up the floor.  We waited to see what would happen next. So far nothing has happened but eventually it may get moldy and he will get around to taking up the floor (he had installed a manufactured, inexpensive floor on top of the concrete, there is no carpet or anything).  I told him next time it should be tile, in case this happens again.

So, when Jon was in Shreveport once the tank got really full and it was raining hard on a day that I had to leave for Loudoun. I was afraid the basement would flood again so I opened the valve. But then all the water went out and the fish were stuck in their tiny, dark puddle.  No rain in the forecast. 

It started to get hot and we worried that it might be too hot in that puddle for them.  We tried to figure out if we should intervene.  Finally Jon put some water in with the hose.  The next day all the fish were dead, floating on the surface.  Dang.  After 15 years of easy living, we killed them with county water.  We were sad that we had killed them. They had survived so much with so little help.

You would think that we would go and buy more fish at the pet store. But no -- there is an abandoned swimming pool next door at a house that will be torn down soon. Jon and Jim discovered there are about 100 feral koi in this pool. For the last few weeks they have been intermittently trying to catch these fish with various nets but the fish are too fast (I don't have time to make this funny but it is).  They constructed different contraptions but the nets moved too slowly and the fish were not going to let themselves be caught.

On our recent 24 hour sojourn on the Potomac River, we did ask some fisherpeople for advice (I may have mentioned them before) and they talked about making a net that could be lifted from the bottom of the pool.

Anyway, this morning Jim just came over, triumphant, with 3 fish in a bucket and put them into the tank.  He has a big interest in this because the mosquitoes affect him the most. It will take years to get these fish up to speed, and they may be disappointed in their new surroundings, but they have a job to do and I am sure they will get right to it.

This is Why We Have a House

After a long and mostly quiet winter and spring, the house is resuming its normal duties.  On Monday my joyful niece Tillie arrived from Denver, and hit the ground running, ready to work immediately.  Late on Tuesday night Peio arrived from Spain, having suddenly rearranged his travel plans because of all the trouble in Turkey.  He slept late on Wednesday but was in the field picking beans by the afternoon.  Jon just left to pick up Benjamin at Dulles.  Benjamin will be in the country for a month, visiting people, working a little but not very much, I expect. Tomorrow night both Rebecca and Alissa will come from Boston, on separate planes, to separate airports.  And then the house will be truly full.

Meanwhile, Anna's house is also filling up.  Our cousin Owen's son Robby arrived last week for his first two week stint on the farm. Stephen and his girlfriend Julia came in on Monday night from Berlin, and over the weekend Jesse and Shalini will be here because who can resist all this?

It is quite noisy in the evenings, but everyone goes to bed early because the day starts at 6:30 for the young people.  I start as soon as it is light out, so I miss the morning breakfast chatter, seeing them for the first time at the daily meeting at 6:30 sharp. 

Without this, it would not feel like summer.  So much energy and laughing and teasing and complaining about bug bites and so much talk about tomato sandwiches.  Tillie talks the most, entertaining all of us, but now that Peio is here she has a partner to banter with.

I need to get back outside.  This is the last day of below 90 degree weather for a long time.

24 Hour Escape

In truth, this is my third 24 hour escape this season -- the first was to Boston for my uncle's memorial gathering, the second was with the Friday Club to Baltimore for non-stop lounging, and this time Jon and I went to a B&B in Trump Country.

Part of the challenge of getting away is just finding the day that will be the least disruptive to the farm.  After some thought, we decided that the period from 2:30 PM Thursday to 2:30 on Friday would be okay.  I got up very early on Thursday to pick all the zinnias and lettuce for Saturday, and then went out to Loudoun to be part of the team out there for a bit.  I even got to go to Farm Yoga in the Green Barn, which felt so delicious.  There was a steady breeze blowing through the barn, even though it was baking hot out in the sun.

Before we left the farm we took showers at our totally deluxe outdoor shower at Timothy's. It is my favorite venue for getting cleaned up, outside in the open air with great water pressure and good hot water (briefly, you can't dawdle).

We discovered as soon as we got in the car (a farm vehicle) that there was no air conditioning. Ugh.  I sent Mark Trader a text to see if he was home, and he was, so we went by his house to see if he could fix the problem. As it turned out, he couldn't fix it but he and Jon tried for a while and I got my bathing suit on and floated in his swimming pool.  The vacation was off to a delightful start.

Then I took a nap while Jon drove for an hour (with the windows down), getting us to our B&B in a part of Maryland we have never visited, near the Potomac River, about halfway between Cumberland and DC. He chose that area because I always want to find water to submerge my whole self and the C&O Canal is an interesting historical place.

The B&B was an 1855 farm house that is on the National Historical Register. It is a house that was sold to developers, included when the family farm was sold, about 10 years ago and then a granddaughter bought the house back when it was clearly sitting there abandoned and unwanted. The developer had built lots of houses on the farm but had never done anything with the house and dairy barn and other farm buildings. She renovated it beautifully and is still working on various projects on her 7 acres. It was exquisitely comfortable.

Last night we wandered around (in the murky heat) in Williamsport, down by the canal and we chanced upon a jazz concert, performed by a small group of park rangers who were celebrating the centennial of the National Park Service.  Sousaphone, saxophone, trumpet played by a guest performer who just showed up, drums, electric guitar (which became a banjo when their generator shut down), keyboard.  When they lost electricity, they left their stage and walked closer to the little audience, New Orleans style.

The only railroad bridge on the C&O Canal that raises up so boats can go under it.

The New Orleans style jazz band, without electric amplification.

This morning we went to the visitor's center and museum and learned about the history of the canal and barges and mules and how it all came to an end in 1924.  As so often happens, we had our own private guide so we could ask lots of questions.  We learned the intricacies of barges passing each other (one towpath, two mules going in opposite directions, two long boats), how the mules got their rest, and other fascinating details. It was all about the mules.

Hana in the Potomac River

But what I really wanted to do was find some water.  We asked the park ranger for directions to McMahon's Mill where we had heard about a swimming hole of some kind.  When we got to the river, we asked an elderly couple (sitting in chairs, fishing off the edge of the towpath) if they knew of this swimming hole, and they had heard of it  but had never seen it.  So we got our suits on and walked up the towpath.  Eventually after turning around and heading back, sweaty and disappointed, we found the much-talked-about tree with the tree rope and the way to climb down into the water.  The water felt great and I tried not to imagine what was down below where we couldn't see.  Someday I want to swim in the kind of water that I can see my feet.  That doesn't happen in this region. We have to go somewhere with an actual lake someday.

We got back to the Loudoun farm by 2:30 after an entirely satisfying escape.  Thanks to the miracle of texting, the workers had loaded my vehicle for me and I got in and headed back to Vienna.  The whole plan worked.  We can do it again, nothing went wrong, everyone got all the picking done, and nobody missed us.

Three Milestone Events in 24 Hours

On Saturday night we had a festive dinner in the Common House, celebrating the first 15 years of this community.  One of our neighbors has a passion for decorating and for making elegant cakes, and she turned our dining room into a whole new space with blue and white gauzy slip covers over our wooden chairs, and sparkly bows wrapped around the back of each chair. We were all covered with glitter by the end of the evening.

We told some parts of the story of how Blueberry Hill came to be, and Anna reported the results of our recent round of interviews, finding out how we are doing.  There were no big surprises.  Mostly it was good to be reminded that there are about 60 of us living here, about 50 people who lived here at some point are gone, that there are 26 of us who were here from the beginning, and there are 26 who have moved in in the last five years.  That's a lot of new people, and we still have our work cut out for us, helping this community maintain its peculiar identity. 

The next day Jon and I went to a potluck lunch, celebrating the recent marriage of two young people from our synagogue.  These are two unusual people, and I appreciate them for that.  They got married very quietly and then they decided to have a lunch for themselves at a local Nature Center. They are moving out of the area in less than a month, and they have only lived here for a few years, but they have accumulated an interesting group of friends.  It was a nice event, and so unpretentious.  I have never been to a potluck wedding lunch before.

That night my mother and Michael L. and I went to a funeral home in suburban Maryland to visit with the family of a cousin of my mother's.  This cousin's husband died suddenly, but he had not been very healthy.  This man had been very kind to my mother over the years, and about 20 years ago he went on a trip to China with my mother and his mother-in-law because all three of them were interested in going, so they went together.  These are not church people, so they had a viewing at this funeral home.  It was an odd scene, having the man lying at the far end of the room, in his coffin, hands crossed, looking quite preserved, while all the rest of us milled around and chatted.  We spent most of our time talking to my second cousins who we have not seen since they were cute little boys. Now they all have children and jobs and wives and houses. It was nice to connect with them -- we knew their grandparents and used to visit them regularly in Hawaii.  Their grandfather Norman Au Hoy was close to my grandmother Hana Au Hoy.  We all have the same great-grandparents.  There was one very cute three-month old boy who looked like Uncle Babe that I got to chat with and hold, and that made my evening.

In between all of that, there was market and CSA and all the usual non-life cycle events.

Vignette

As I was on my way up from the stand, running late trying to bring Jon some mint to put into the fruit salad for the BBH 15th anniversary celebration, I had to stop to see what had happened on Route 7.  I had not heard the crash moments before because I was on the loader, but two cars had collided and got hooked together and somehow one dragged the other until they got separated. One car was quite bashed up in the back, and it was on top of the median strip.  Immediately the traffic stopped in both directions and people started to get out of their vehicles to help.  From their reactions, it didn't look like anything horrible had happened to the people in the car.  I saw two different women grab a red emergency bag out of the trunks of their cars, and hustle to the scene, pulling gloves on. I felt tears coming to my eyes, watching people figuring out what to do while everyone waited for the fire trucks.  Mostly they were signalling a tentative thumbs up to people who were watching from afar.  I had to leave before the firemen got the passengers out of the car (no one had emerged at all) so I don't know what happened in the end. 

I had to get to the Common House for the big anniversary dinner, produced by a team of neighbors who know how to make a party.  My role was to be one of the storytellers who told our origin story, in 10 minutes.

(I have decided that I will write whenever I have a moment, instead of waiting for a whole thematic story to form in my mind.  Attempting to write real postcards instead of essays sometimes.)

Shechechyanu

Nell is the one who always remembers to notice when it is time to say a Shechechyanu.  Because I have known her for a long time now, I too am beginning to notice those moments.

Yesterday I went into the first bean patch of the year to see how close the beans were, and they were beautiful and ready. So I sat down to pick. And that was the moment that needed a blessing. 

It feels like it was just a few weeks ago that I planted those beans.  It was May 16, two weeks later than usual because of all the rain. There was a brief window of opportunity where the ground was all ready and dry enough and I was desperate to get those seeds in the ground. I got on the tractor (that still had the bean planter on it from last year -- we are so rich in little tractors that we can leave implements on them for one purpose...no one else has so many antique tractors that start right up, I bet) and started it up -- but something was definitely amiss.  After a few terrible grinding sessions while I tried to put it in first gear, I determined that there was no working clutch.  So I turned it off and I put it into first gear and turned it back on again in gear and shot out of the shed, like Batman. I drove over to the field and turned off the tractor (because there was no clutch to help me stop). I set up the seeds in the planter and pushed the starter button again, careening straight into the field.

This reminded me of my long ago youth (very long ago, when I was about 4) -- my job was to drive the tractor in the corn field, keeping the nose of the Farmall H aimed between two rows of corn.  My parents and the workers picked corn on both sides of the wagon that the tractor was towing.  I was too short to reach the clutch, and not strong enough anyway.  When it was time to start driving, my father would step up behind me onto the draw bar, lean on the starter button with the meaty part at the base of his thumb (I remember this) and the tractor would go. When it was time to stop, someone would yell "HO!" and I would push the little button with my toe and the tractor would shut off.  I wonder how many times we really did this -- it doesn't seem very efficient -- but I do remember it, so it must have been more than once.

Anyway, that's why I knew that this was an okay thing to do when I discovered the 140 had no clutch.  So I planted six long rows of beans and hoped they would come up.

They came up vigorously, but they huddled for weeks during that long cold spell in May.  When it came time to cultivate them, I hopped onto the 1940-something Cultivating B and headed to the field.  The engine was not working perfectly: it kept losing power and eventually stalling out.  Once again, I was determined to get those beans weeded, and luckily the battery was strong so I could keep starting it again and nursing it along until it finally choked itself to death.

It is never my job to fix the tractors, I just use them, and I came home from both of those near-failure expeditions and told the mechanics (Mark and Jon) that I needed those tractors to work in ten days, when it was time to plant/cultivate again.  Because most of my dreams still come true, both tractors were diagnosed and repaired on time.  The one with no clutch turned out to be a rusted clutch plate, stuck like glue to the flywheel.  Mark Trader said it was because a mouse nest was in the tractor and all that ammonia caused the metal to get welded together. It took him a whole day to wrestle that one apart.  The cultivating tractor had a hole in the exhaust manifold, and that wasn't too hard to fix.

This is a very long way of saying that those beans grew in spite of all the hurdles, and they even have many fewer bean beetles than usual.  They are glorious.  Blessed are You, Creator of the Universe, for giving us life, for sustaining us, and for enabling us to reach this season. Amen.

No News is Good News

There has been little of interest to report in the last few weeks.  We are back to that time when vegetables dominate all the daylight hours. 

Yesterday, a cool and cloudy day in the 60s, we had the annual pickernick.  I cannot remember another July 4th weekend in my lifetime that was so blissfully cool.  We chose July 3 as the date for the picnic because both Alissa and Rebecca could be here and there were a number of people who were more available on that day. It turned out to be a delicious evening.  And the blueberries were in excellent condition -- no bugs, great flavor, plentiful. Everyone had such a nice time picking berries and sitting around eating and talking.  It was easy to forget about the next day's work.

I was no help at all getting ready for the party but I knew that the girls would be more useful than I am anyway.  Alissa baked gorgeous pies, they made muffins (I wasn't here so I can't give credit to the correct daughter here), Becca helped Jon set up the venue. Jon made mountains of barbecued chicken, standing over the grill but not sweating through his shirt this time.

The farm season is careening along. I say careening because I feel like we are in a vehicle which is only barely under control, relying on good will and good fortune to keep us on track.  Carrie is out of town on vacation and most of the crew is made up of new workers, which means that I am doing a lot of early morning picking to make sure everything is done on time. So far so good.  My mother and Michael Lipsky provide excellent ballast, keeping us from flying off the road (Michael and I picked all the vegetables for the CSA on Saturday morning -- that is a first for the two of us).  Alissa came down to the stand to help bunch flowers and offered some necessary guidance to the stand workers -- I haven't been able to pay attention to all the details, and she very correctly pointed out that some of my instructions were misinterpreted (displays were very meager).  All we really did to get ready to open the stand was a lot of sweeping.  I am always amazed that customers come on the first day, since the day before the place looks like an abandoned shed, full of egg cartons and plastic bags that get dropped off all winter long. They know us by now.

The tomatoes are not ripe yet, even though they were planted earlier than usual. That long cool, wet spell in May slowed everything down.  But I don't remember when the fields have looked so consistently healthy and beautiful, so that long, cool wet spell in May had some excellent side benefits, I think.

Mostly all I do is get ready for the next day.  This involves a chaos of lists and charts and counting, and a whole lot of picking.  Today I picked lettuce, chard, beets, fennel, dandelion greens, onions, leeks, endive, basil.  I load up ten empty crates and head out to shop.  Fill up my crates, roll back to the stand.  Ten more crates on the golf cart, back out to a different field. Fill them up, come back in to see how things are going. The two other people picked all the squash and washed the vegetables that I hauled in.  Washing takes much more time than picking so it is easy to stay ahead of them.

Sarita is here, totally self-sufficient.  She gets herself to the rec center, she makes her own food, she mixes in with the crowd.  We forgot to warn her about the pickernick but of course she was ready to jump in the car and go.

And now I have to go down and help close up the stand. It's the Fourth of July and a rainy afternoon, I doubt anyone has stopped to buy a vegetable in the last few hours. I will try to think of something more interesting to talk about for the next postcard...