Wordle Conversation

So, this morning the Wordle solution was MANLY (I can say this here because no one reads this blog in any timely way).  For the last year I have been texting back and forth with a friend, sharing our Wordle triumphs and failures, and sometimes the words spark a brief conversation -- like the time when the solution was suddenly topical in the news, and possibly politically questionable (can't remember any of the details), something to do with the abortion rulings.

Anyway, this friend says, "Are we allowed to use that word anymore?"

Here is this morning's text exchange:

Me: "I absolutely know some upright honorable sweet manly men. You are one. Jon is another. Michael L. is another. There are obviously characteristics that come with being male, not necessarily having to do with brawn.  And I think it is quite possible that pride and stubbornness are part of the manly list."

Him: "That's a nice way to think about it. It doesn't have to be the same as macho."

Me:"Oh no. Not in my mind. There was an 80-something worker named Dick (who is on my mind because he just died) and he was a manly man. The kindest, with such integrity."

"Him: Who's stubborn?"

Me: "Do you know any men who are not stubborn? Every single man I know is prideful and stubborn in some way! Still lovable but in my estimation it is definitely a man thing. And that's why there are plumbers in the world. Mostly men."

Him: "In the case of plumbing, you need to be stubborn to get it fixed most of the time. Jon is exhibit A in that case."

Me: "This is why manly is not a bad characteristic in my mind."

Him: "You've convinced me."

But I have to admit that I have never really thought about this word or how it is used in normal society. It is probably true that the progressive half of this country might have a different definition from the retrogressive half (is that how we describe the two perspectives?).  The retrogressive people might have a whole different vision of manliness, and it is part of the perpetuation of what has been wrong with human culture since the beginning of time.

I guess if we want to keep using that word -- which I am not sure we really do -- we will need to redefine it. I just looked it up and it has to do with virility, strength, ability to fight. This may be why so many people are finding a new way to express their gender. Who wants to be part of those assumptions?

At the risk of really stepping into a polticially incorrect puddle, I think that the assumptions that people make about what it means to be a woman are a part of the reason that many more are finding that they don't identify as women.  But I think the concept of womanliness is also incorrect, obviously. It is outdated and far too narrow.  I understand that my view is a primitive and un-nuanced view of the current gender situation, but I really can't comprehend why anyone would not want to be a woman. We just need to change what we think it means to be a woman.

Non-binary life seems interesting but fraught. We will see what Wordle does with that.

We Are Never Ready, But We Are Always Ready

In the deep middle of the night, or early Sunday morning, my friend Roz turned to me and said, "are you going to write about this on your blog?"  I hadn't thought about that yet, but I said, "if I am allowed." She gave me permission, which is good, because I would have had a hard time not writing about the events of recent days.

We were sitting together in a crowded, darkened room, truly in the middle of the night, with her husband Ted asleep in the bed right next to us.  A few hours before, he had been transferred to his own room, in hospice care. He was on a 22 hour dose of morphine, and he was settled and comfortable, breathing slowly, without too much bad gurgling or wheezing.

Roz had been imagining this scenario for months and years, as Ted had been gradually declining, falling, going to rehab, falling again, more rehab, but always on a downward trajectory. She said it was like death by a thousand cuts. It was so hard to watch and be part of, and she supported him every step of the way. It was really sad and hard. 

So there we were, all of a sudden, but not all of a sudden. I just happened to be the one who was there, by some amount of chance, but I was honored to be allowed to be there, watching over both of them. I had taken over from Nancy who had been there all afternoon and evening until 1 AM when we switched off.  Roz and I talked quietly all night long. Her brain was too alert to allow her to rest, and she felt compelled to be present for Ted anyway. 

From past experience, we both knew what was going to happen, and we were both totally at peace with all of it. I knew, and so did she, that we would be on a fast-moving roller coaster as soon as Ted took his last breath. We stayed completely in the moment, not thinking about what would be unleashed later.  We timed his breaths, just because, and he was pretty steady at about 7 breaths per minute.  Around 5:30 or so, the quality of his breathing changed, and I gripped Roz's knee. She was holding his hand and looking intently into his face, telling him to rest, just rest, everything is okay.  His breaths became not real breaths, just a brief inhale and a non-existent exhale. This happened for a minute or more and then he just stopped breathing. There was no drama and no death rattle. He was gone. Poof.

For about half an hour we just sat there, and people came in to verify that he was really gone. Roz started to make phone calls, even though it was about 6:00 on a Sunday morning. Her brain was really in overdrive by now, and she started to make lists in her mind. She said to him, "Teddy, you left me such a mess."  But it wasn't true. There was no mess.

As we all know so well, this is where Judaism really matters. It helps so, so much. We know what to do, all of us. We know where to be, how to be, what to do. We do it. But Roz has an additional layer of protection and help, in addition to the Jewish one. She has friends who also know what to do, and how to do it, because we have been friends for a long time and we are also incredibly capable people. 

Capable people have a magnetic field -- we like to do things together, whether it is book club or building cohousing (that's not Roz, that's me/us) or running a business or keeping a family actively connected (that's my sister).  We are naturally inclined to get stuff done and that is what we do. It is a gift and we share it with joy.

Anyway, there were lots of tasks and they got divided up easily and quickly. The plan unfolded organically and kept on going. I had to leave the scene at 8:00 to go set up the CSA, so I left everything in other people's hands. Hannah our doctor friend came to help Roz finish the hospital parts of her day. Nancy who knows much more than she should about death and burial, she got the job of helping Roz figure out the details of coordinating what to do with Ted's body. It took a big part of Sunday.  Nancy was exactly the right person for that job. Roz was really tired by then. Meanwhile, our rabbi was doing what rabbis do, talking to the family, figuring out the funeral details. Jon and I figured out what needed to be done in order to have a meal of condolence after the burial at Blueberry Hill.  He went shopping for the second time in 24 hours (the first time was to get Roz something to eat in the middle of the night) and pulled together a good lunch.  Rebecca boiled eggs and made brownies. We figured out how to minimize the Christmas decorations in the Common House without actually doing too much (Rebecca put a sheet around the tree, it looked pretty funny but it was the thought that counted).

Just before I finally went to bed, I had one niggling feeling that something was not yet finished. Roz had started one half-thought in the night, and we had not remembered to circle  back to it.  But I sent her a text at midnight on Sunday (why would I think she would be awake, but she was): "you said something about this, but I am not supposed to say anything tomorrow, am I?" She texted back, you are speaking.  That was all, no information about who else was speaking. Okay.

On Monday morning, on my way to my annual mammogram (when I scheduled that, it seemed like 8:30 on December 12 would be a very safe and unbusy time), I called Nancy to see what she knew about this speaking assignment. She was surprised that I didn't know since everyone else had known that Ted had made that request. It just never got to me. Okay. More information, but not much.

I dropped a vegetable share at a house in Reston (a homebound CSA customer) and went home to write. 

Meanwhile, Jon had a task of his own, separate from lunch preparation. Roz asked him to be part of a group of men that performed the last mitzvah for Ted -- washing the body before burial. We don't know anyone else who has done this, but our rabbi Michael studied up on it very quickly and he led them through the ritual, hands-on. Jon said it was absolutely real. They took all the bandages and labels and tags off and they washed the body thoroughly. Roz wanted the last hands that touched Ted to be hands that loved him. That is what happened.

The funeral was exactly what Ted would have wanted, I am sure. The choir sang two beautiful psalm songs that we often sing at funerals, and it felt to us that we sounded better than we ever had. It is hard to sing when you would rather be crying, but somehow this time we did it.

I did the first eulogy and the rabbi followed with a really beautiful one that filled in all the details. As he said later, we were a good match. I was brief (thinking about what Ted would have said if I went on for too long) and Michael took the liberty of telling everything else that added meaning and context, telling the story with such love and humor.

Right after Ted died, Roz said (knowing the answer full well): why do Jews have this terrible, tight timeline after a death? It's crazy.

Monday was a great day, really.  We fulfilled all the requirements of burying our loved one, we took care of each other, there was a shiva in the evening and there will be seven in total because as Roz says, I don't understand how seven can end with a three (shiva is seven, but many mourners choose to have one shiva, or two, or maybe three). She is, after all, a rabbi. 

I only told the parts that I know, but there are plenty of other people who have also stepped in to take care of Roz. A dear friend came right up from Richmond and stayed with her for a few days. Her big circle of friends will make sure she has something to eat until she says to stop doing that.

May his memory be a blessing and may we all remember to take care of Roz in the weeks and months and years to come.

Thanksgiving Day Thanks

It is 7:15 in the morning and the house is quiet. Every bed is full with people that I love, and the beds at Anna's house are full with more people that I love and there is even overflow parking in beds at the house next door to Anna's house.  Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday, with no close competition. Without any manipulation or planning on our part, all of our children have made it a tradition to come home for this holiday. At first it surprised me that they would make this a priority (when we were growing up, our family often hit the road and went north to Boston and New Haven to join others for Thanksgiving. Our house was never the hub.) but Anna reinforced this homeward migration by starting a decade-long tradition of being the center of family gravity. We no longer even think to make plans to go away. This is the place to be.  There will be 37 people at dinner today.

Of course, not everyone comes every time.  Benjamin and his family are far away. They have made plans to travel back here for the other time of gravitational pull that is becoming a tradition -- Anna and Gordon now rent a big house for a five day retreat every December and they try to pull in as many of our mother's descendants as they can. 

Anyway, before everyone wakes up and starts back in on the pie-making and turkey rubbing, I can sit here and baste myself in gratitude and wonder.  

Of course, the first blessing to note is that every single one of us is healthy.  Someone usually has covid but at this moment each member of our extended family is in good condition, mentally and physically. This is no small feat.  Mom is 87 and all of her systems are in excellent working order. She will make sure the plants in the greenhouse are not forgotten today (no one else will think of that). Her husband is 82 and last Sunday he worked the whole day at Takoma Park, from loading up to unloading eight hours later on a day that never got above about 33 degrees. Jon is in his 14th year with a low-flame and incurable cancer and he is the one who will be wrangling this 30 pound turkey into the oven and making sure it is ready by dinner. The youngest people, ages 9 months through 5 years, are all in good shape, if you don't care about runny noses. We are all blessed, at this moment, and I note our resilience and am glad.

From a seasonal perspective, this is such a great week. Every year our last markets and our last CSA days happen on the Sunday before Thanksgiving.  We push hard right up to that last day, filling the coolers to the ceilings and wall to wall with everything that we can gather for the last hurrah. It was a brutally cold week, with wind and rain, but we got it done.  There were more than enough carrots for everyone (which is not always true, and so it must be noted).  On the Monday morning after that Sunday, we did not go into the field at all.  Everything was frozen, and it didn't matter a bit. We had done our job and finished 25 weeks of CSA, without missing a beat.

Yesterday we resumed our farming activities in a low-key way because we still need to be ready for our weekly Winter CSA. Compared to the main season, this is child's play. We have 140 customers, which is about 1/4 of the number of CSA folks we fed last week. 

As I thought about the plan for this week's harvest, I realized there was an opportunity to combine all the blessings of this week -- the convergence of family, the lack of pressure, the return to beautiful weather, more gorgeous carrots still in the ground.  Instead of going out to Loudoun to pick with the one part time employee who was working, I decided to figure out how to get us some company and make it a party.  I sent out an email invitation, with one day's warning. At 1:00 in the afternoon yesterday, 16 of us went out to dig the last Loudoun carrots of the season.  The crew included two beloved retired farmers from farms next door, my mom the great-grandmother and her always-ready-to-work husband, two of her children plus one spouse, four of her grandchildren, three of her great-grandchildren, and the one worker who we all know and love.  What a team. We did real work, but since there were so many of us, it was not real work. We collected up the last 800 pounds of carrots plus about 400 pounds of rutabaga just because it was right there.

The house is waking up. Thanksgiving Day is underway.  Happy Thanksgiving to all. May you also have many blessings to count.

A Fish Story

 

I never said I wanted to fish. I certainly never wanted to catch a fish. I have never been curious about fishing and I already know that I can’t kill a mouse or a rat or a groundhog, and I have good reason to want to kill them. I have no motivation to cause any pain to a fish. I also don’t like boats much, although small boats are better than big ones.

But none of that mattered. A friend of Jon’s who has been a fishing guide for the last 43 years decided that it was time to get us into his boat. He is retiring after this season and he and Jon have been talking about fishing for about 37 of those years. I was never there for any of the conversations – they have an annual cider pressing date where they drink rum and make cider – but somehow I got included in the invitation.  There did not seem to be any gracious way to decline, especially since he made us choose a date when he was here last fall, making cider.  I chose Monday, July 11, knowing that I like to go swimming in July and Mondays are the only day that could happen.

A couple of days ago, I turned the page on my calendar and told Jon, “We’re going fishing with Mark Kovach on Monday.”  Oh yeah? And then a day later we got a letter in the mail confirming the date and telling us where to be and what to wear. Oy.  This was really going to happen. I still didn’t want to fish, but I said I would go and hang out in the boat.  Jon got us fishing licenses anyway.

We arrived at the boat ramp in Brunswick, MD at 8 AM on the most glorious July morning in memory. It was 62 degrees with low humidity, we had driven through fog that lasted from Ashburn all the way past the farm and down to the Potomac River. It was a cornpicking morning with heavy dew.

Mark rolled up with his Jeep, towing a trailer with a boat that is really a very sturdy inflatable raft, rigged out with a custom designed aluminum frame that provides three seats that swivel, a rack for the fishing rods, holders for the oars, and two strong “hip holders” – places where you can stand up and be held firmly around the thighs so you won’t fly out of the boat if things get rough.  The boat was named by his wife: “Potomac Mistress.” Later we would find out more about that.

As Mark unloaded all the gear from his Jeep and loaded up the boat, I was reminded of Lani and all her packing and unpacking to go on horse adventures. So much stuff, organized into specific bags, each with its own spot on the boat. He poured ice into coolers and he refused help because he knew where everything went and he didn’t want to explain it all to well-meaning people who had no idea how to help.

His partner arrived from Martinsburg, WV (now we had got two people out of bed at dawn so we could receive this gift that only one of us thought was a good idea) so he could drop us off up the river, upstream from Harpers Ferry.  These two men had done this routine hundreds or maybe even thousands of times, on this stretch of river.

When we got in the boat (with perfect instructions on what to hold onto, where to put our feet), he asked about our previous fishing experience. Jon had been to camp when he was 15 and had done a lot of fishing. That was 50 years ago. I had never held a fishing rod in my life.  And I still wasn’t planning to. 

So then Mark explained where the fish are most likely to be – hanging out in the areas where the current is not as fast, behind rocks, or in the space between a fast current or a slow current. All very interesting information, not particularly relevant to me, but I listened and asked questions because he was being so generous to spend an entire day doing something he does for a living, and he was giving it to us as a present.

Or course Jon could just flip his wrist and the line went way out, the bait sailing to some place I couldn’t even see because I can’t even watch a golf ball or a hockey puck moving through space. They just disappear.  Mark asked if I wanted to try casting.

That was the beginning of many hours of bumbling around. First I couldn’t do it because I am left-handed, so he switched the mechanism around to the other side of the rod. Then I just did not grasp the whole concept of the bale (bail?) and how it opens and closes – that’s the spool that holds the line, and there is a thing you flip to unlock it before you cast the line. You have to put two fingers above the bail and two below. Your index finger holds the line against the rod. You make sure nothing is tangled so the line will unroll fast. Theoretically, you just hold the rod up, allowing it to bend backwards to gain some energy and you flick your wrist quickly, letting go with your index finger and the bait will pull the line out. You have to aim. Ha. That is a lot of simultaneous motion, the flicking and the letting go.  And then if you happen to succeed, there is more to do.

Mark could see everything I was doing wrong, and he was patient, every single hour of the way. I was letting go too early. I was letting go too late. I was throwing, I wasn’t casting. He had to untangle the line over and over because I was waiting too long to cast and the bait was twirling around at the end of the rod, making knots. He said my knots were getting really sophisticated. By lunchtime I managed to cast successfully, but not consistently. I was still throwing, not casting. Since I never wanted to catch a fish anyway, just learning to cast became my goal. I wanted to do two good casts in a row before the day was over.

Meanwhile, Jon wasn’t catching any fish anyway. He was in the front, following Mark’s directions about where to look for fish, and not finding any. Once I did feel a fish tugging on my line but luckily it went away.

I was now learning to untangle my own knots, which was very satisfying. I was so glad this was artificial bait.  Very realistic and squishy and I barely wanted to touch it even though it was made of rubbery plastic (Mark kept changing the bait for both of us, to see if the fish would like something different). After lunch I got better at casting and I could even aim for the area of interest. Sometimes.

We had lunch on an island where we got to sit in chairs at a table that Mark unfolded from one of his many bags (oh, I should say what he brought: salmon candy, fried chicken, chips, drinks, tuna sandwich, roast beef and brie sandwich, cookies, little salads). We talked about our kids and the summer house in Michigan that the family is renovating. We talked some about our businesses. He has been to the farm at least once a year since 1984 so he has some perspective, although it is mostly from the vantage point of the cider press, which is a funny place to watch from.

When we got back on the water, there was an abandoned inner tube on the side of the river and Mark asked Jon if he wanted to salvage it.  While they were focused on that, a fish got on my line. I swore. I definitely did not want to catch a fish. Mark coached me because I did everything wrong in every possible way, but somehow the fish wanted to stay caught so I got it to Mark’s hands and he took it off the hook. It was a small mouthed bass, he said it was about two years old, and he said the teeth were soft and I should hold it by the mouth. Oh good grief. So I held up this tiny little fish by putting my thumb in its mouth and Jon took the picture. Then Mark threw it back into the water.  He said of course I would be the one to catch the first fish, after all that (hours and hours of so many casts from both ends of the boat).  Pretty soon after that I caught another one but we didn’t bother with the picture.

Eventually Jon caught two fish and my total was three. Mark focused on his students, even though we both asked him to fish so we could see how a real angler did it.  He cast his line about five times but didn’t persist.

It was a gorgeous day, all day long. Low humidity, bright sunshine, about 84 degrees at the most.  It also seemed like a long day. We traveled about seven miles, stopping often to fish, occasionally going over some small rapids. The boat was so round and steady that it didn’t matter if we went down sideways or backwards, or spinning. Not like a canoe or a rowboat. Hard to tip it over. Mark did all the decision-making and rowing. We just sat there and looked around at the scenery.

He told stories all day and answered all our questions.  Toward the end, Jon asked him to tell us about the most unusual fish he had caught on this stretch of river. He said he had caught a big catfish, and that it got tangled in the line because it thrashed so hard. When he had it in his hand, and he was getting it unwrapped (and thinking about eating it because catfish are so yummy), the fish started to make croaking noises. He says catfish do croak.  He had two friends with him in the boat, watching this whole scene.  The fish said, “Throw me back!”  Mark looked at it and wondered if he was hearing things. The fish said it again, and Mark asked his friends if they heard it too. They did.  Then it said, “Throw me back. PLEASE!”  Mark threw it back into the water. He wasn’t going to mess with a talking fish, especially one that said “please.”  

I asked him about the name of his boat and how his wife felt about his fishing. He said she used to help him with the business but he wasn’t grateful enough and he neglected to say thank you and she got mad enough to decide never to help him again.  She has stuck to her decision and has also told him when he needs to reassess his priorities and spend more time with the family. They have been married for over 40 years, and they still like each other in spite of the fishing business.

Ten hours of floating and talking and fishing.  I lost one hat, we lost about five lures between us, we didn’t break any of his expensive equipment, and we caught some fish. We saw cormorants and eagles and herons and ducks and deer. It was a day we will remember. And now I know so much more about casting than I did before. I would starve to death if I didn’t have someone else to put the bait on and take the fish off, and Jon would have to cut up and cook the fish, but there is some small chance that I would be able to catch a fish if I had most of a day to do it.

When Lani asked me later why we were parked in Brunswick all day (she can watch me on Google maps), I said we were fishing. She said, “pardon me?” I said “we were FISHING!” She burst out laughing, saying she didn’t think she had heard me right, and that was the last thing she thought I would say. Yeah, me too.

My Definition of Contentment

 (I understand that there is a real possibility that no one will see this post, as we are now distracted by the other newsfeed at downforthecouch.blogspot.com, but this topic seems to suit Postcards better, so I am using this outlet this time.)

Current conditions that lead to contentment:
Deciding to make soup in the late morning because it is snowing on March 12 and it is not a day to go outside.  We knew this weather was on the way but it should only be a brief bump on the road to spring. We did nothing in this household to prepare for a snow day. No shopping, no nothing. So when I got out my favorite cast iron pot that Jim McDade gave me when I was wishing for just this pot, I did not yet know what kind of soup I would make. There were some scraps of onions and celery and a few sprouting potatoes and a cooked cob of corn, plus some milk I had left out on the counter overnight by mistake.  All of those were pointing in a good direction.  Twenty minutes later there is a very satisfying pot of corn/potato/fish chowder on the stove.

Two of our kids are on vacation together in a lovely warm place, enjoying a much-needed break.  Our other kid, the one with the baby, lives just a brief golf cart trip away and that baby comes to visit regularly. This baby is charming and cheerful and chubby and not challenging. Her parents are also lovely.

We feel that we have done all that we can to be ready for our brief absence from the ongoing work at the farm. Jon has pushed very hard to check things off his list, I have made many plans.  We are leaving everything in good working order and there are so many people to keep everything moving along.  I am not worried.

Right this minute there is a truck that is prepared to go to market tomorrow morning (it will be 18 degrees at 6 AM -- ugh) and the whole load is packed and waiting in the cooler.  Ordinarily this work would happen today, but we moved everything up by one whole day so we could have soup and lie on the couches. If that doesn't add to a general feeling of contentment, I don't know what does.

There are of course many things going on -- a terrible war in Ukraine with no end in sight, a bone marrow transplant in about a week -- and it feels like a gift to be allowed to feel cozy and comfortable and healthy and safe.

Stay well, everyone.

Why You Should Go to Area Museums

 

We put on our masks and went through the door of the Gullah Museum. It was about 11:15 and the museum had opened fifteen minutes before. It was one room with tables full of artifacts and newspaper articles, with story quilts on the walls and rough wooden tools stacked on the floor, with small signs explaining their significance. But we never walked around to look at these objects because there was a storyteller already in action, quietly relating the history of the Gullah culture, starting from the very beginning. Two people sat close to the man, listening intently.  It seemed rude to wander around when there was a live person talking, so we sat down on the hard chairs and joined the group. We sat a little bit separate since no one else was masked.

He was an elderly, thin man with a bushy white beard and a cap on his head. His right hand waved around constantly, disconnected from the narrative, and he paid no attention to it. When we got there, the storyline was somewhere in the 1600s, and he was describing the inhumane and deadly conditions on the ships that carried millions of people from Africa.  Soon after that he handed out a large sheet of paper with a series of horrific facts about how many people were brought into camps from all over West Africa, put onto ships, dying before they got on the ships, dying en route, dying after they arrived.  Fifty million people were rounded up and in the end fifteen million were alive to become slaves.  At the bottom of the page there was a chart that showed how many people there were in Africa, in Asia, in Europe in 1600, 1700, 1800 – demonstrating the long-term population impact of this forced exodus.

The title of the paper was something like this:  The African Holocaust and Diaspora.  Somehow these words did not seem incongruous to me, but he went into a long side explanation of why he chose those particular words to describe what happened to all those enslaved people.  He explained that he had grown up in a neighborhood that was heavily Jewish and he went to school all the way through high school with Jewish kids. He was told from the beginning that he should go to college, but his family didn’t have the resources, and he went to a technical school to learn to be a printer.  I could hear a faint Boston accent, and even though he didn’t say he was from New England, it seemed clear to me.

After a while it became evident that he was using the quilt on the wall as an outline for his stories, and we were moving slowly around the blocks on the perimeter. He said that he never understood why his wife made the ship look so pretty (it was made with pink floral fabric) because that is not what they looked like.

When we got to the block that signified agriculture (a boy with a hoe in his hand), he got the most animated, describing how the plantation owners did not know how to grow many of the crops that came with the Africans, and how they brought the knowledge of rice-growing with them, and how that rice made this particular county in South Carolina the richest in all the colonies, and South Carolina the richest of the states – until slavery ended with the Civil War. The entire economy, of course, was based on slave labor. The most important lesson from this story was that no one knew how the farmers of South Carolina became rice growers. When a 17^th century visitor asked a plantation owner how anyone knew about all those practices, the man said another plantation owner had had an “epiphany.” It just came to him. It took an interested academic many years to piece together the true story, through interviews and research. It turns out that in the 1500s there were 20 varieties of rice cultivated in West Africa and five varieties came to the New World, eventually.

The other couple started to try to say they really needed to leave, and with each gentle interruption, the storyteller acknowledged them and said he just wanted to finish his point. He continued on. It became comical, watching them trying to figure out how to extricate themselves. He even ignored their offer of a donation, saying he had one more thing he wanted to say, and that the expected donation is ten dollars per adult.

When they finally did manage to hand him a twenty dollar bill and go, I took the opportunity to introduce ourselves as Jews, farmers, people with no background in exactly what the word Gullah means and where it came from.  I asked direct questions and got straightforward, interesting answers. The whole thing was interesting.  First we had to deal with the Jewish part – he had worked for a Kosher caterer in his high school years so he heard a lot of Jewish blessings at all the Saturday events. Then he recited the motzi, flawlessly (and I noted that he pronounced Adonai as “Adonoy” and I knew I was right about Boston because he sounded just like Leon). He grew up in Roxbury, MA. He told the amusing story of being at some interfaith event where a rabbi turned to him and asked if he wanted to offer a blessing, probably assuming that it would come from an expected Christian background. He offered a blessing in Hebrew and confused everyone.

Then I asked forgiveness, but could he just start from the very beginning and tell me what we mean by Gullah.  He patiently explained that Gullah is the culture that came out of the many mixed languages and customs of the West African slaves (he only used the word “slaves,” he never said “enslaved people.”), further mixed with English. Gullah is still spoken today. The culture was preserved because after the Civil War, many former slaves moved to the barrier islands and continued their traditions and language.

We didn’t have as much trouble taking our leave, partly because he was not delivering a monologue and there were logical stopping places to the flow of information. We were fascinated by this man and when we got back to the internet, we read all about him. He never mentioned that he had more education than trade school, but his vocabulary and capacity for fluid narrative and his facility with numbers (I noticed that he effortlessly translated those millions into “2.7 million” instead of 2,665,100) made me wonder about his education and work history.

He is of Cape Verdean descent, he married a woman who was born and raised in Georgetown (where the museum was), she was a real mover and shaker, an artist and activist, she made a quilt for Michelle Obama because or her Gullah ancestry. His name is Andrew Rodrigues, he went to college on an athletic scholarship, became a chemist and worked for the FDA, went back to school and got a law degree, became the first Black attorney to work for Bethlehem Steel. When he retired, he and his wife moved back to her hometown and established this museum. And now he is there six days a week, teaching anyone who comes in.

His wife died seven years ago and his daughters moved here to take care of him, he said, because “they didn’t think I could take care of myself.”  Now I understand the tone of voice when he said that. He has lived such a self-determined life, and now accepts help and direction from his daughters. I hope that there is a steady stream of learners going through that museum. It’s a rare opportunity to learn from a passionate scholar.

 

How Plumbers Are Like Groundhogs

I just finished reading this book that a pool-friend thought I might like – it was a wide-ranging look at what happens when nature comes into conflict with humans. I only know this pool-friend from being in the locker room/pool at the same time for many years, and she knows that we have this farm, and she is an avid gardener so she thought I might like to read something smart and funny about black bears and leopards and other troublesome varmints. (If you want to learn about how the official Fish and Wildlife folks deal with animals that won’t stop living their lives in human habitats, it’s Fuzz by Mary Roach.)

As longtime readers already know, I have been in an ongoing skirmish with the animals that want to chew up our crops.  We have come back around to goose season.  Canada geese that don’t migrate because they were born around here, those flocks are getting bigger and more troublesome all the time. In the winter, they always come to our fields in Vienna and eat as much cover crop as they can and poop as much as possible.  The book talked about how naturalists were asked to deal with a bird problem – there was a massive campaign to kill blackbirds in the midWest in the mid-1900s because the farmers were sure that the birds were eating a huge percentage of the grain.  After much study and calculating and not much success at killing redwing blackbirds, they figured out that the birds were eating less grain per acre than what was spilled between combine and truck.   However, I can stand there and count how many geese there are in the field, and I can see how much poop is spread all over.  People always say, but isn’t that free fertilizer? And I always say, is that what you really want to be feeding your lettuce plants?  Raw manure?  It’s actually illegal, from a food safety standpoint. So in the winter, I kid you not, I go to the field and chase those disgusting birds out of the field every day, sometimes multiple times a day. The real mission is to keep them from laying eggs and hatching them here. That would mean that the geese who were hatched here would consider this their home and would always come back, for all time. In fact, the conclusion in the book was that the most effective way to keep birds out of a field turns out to be paying an adult to chase them out, running like a crazy person and looking menacing. Yep, that’s what I do. They found that paying children to do it is not effective. The kids get bored with that job. The birds always figure out very quickly that the bombs and the waving streamers and the guns going off periodically do not mean anything, and they learn to ignore them.

Back in the old days, we used to try to kill groundhogs until there were no more. It was a fool’s errand. You can kill groundhogs and slow down the eating, but the groundhog holes will have invisible “For Rent” signs up immediately, and a new batch of chubby, plant-eating rodents will move in.  Some holes are in really high value places, at the edge of the woods, just 20 feet from the nearest row of salad mix.  By now I have found most of the high dollar woodchuck condos and I have been working to bring down the value of the real estate.  I still believe in this method, even if it requires a fair amount of upkeep.  I fill those holes with rotting vegetables or the cooked bones of chickens or whatever the regular animals won’t eat (the chickens and pigs get first dibs on these foods, and then the groundhogs get the leftovers). When we don’t have pigs or chickens, the groundhogs get the sour milk and moldy bread all to themselves.  I fill the holes, pushing the food down as far as I can, and then I jam sticks in to the entrance/exit until it is really hard to clear.  Then I go away for a few days.  Eventually they dig it out and clean up.  Groundhogs are finicky about cleanliness.  After a few weeks of this, they stop digging out. They move on.  Triumph.  The carrot tops grow back and all is not lost.  I drive around on my golf cart, checking the holes.  Sometimes they are abandoned for months and even years at a time. Then someone else moves in and we start over.  This science writer did not encounter anyone else who had this method.  You have to be pretty determined and crazy to do this. It suits me.

So why does the title say that plumbers are like groundhogs?  It’s not a perfect analogy but it came to mind yesterday when I was trying to teach the construction workers not to travel a route which is off limits to them. They have been told repeatedly, in clear well-articulated English, that the gate between the farm and Blueberry Hill is not a legal access point.  They are not allowed to drive through there.  I promised VDOT ten years ago that I would defend that gate and only farm workers would use it. By law, VDOT was supposed to close it off to all traffic, but we wanted a golf cart and tractor path.  It has not been easy, defending that gate.  When people get stuck in terrible traffic on Route 7, someone inevitably gets smart and drives through the farm on our gravel roads, despite the signage saying FARM VEHICLES ONLY.   The plumbers and other tradespeople who are renovating the New House have of course discovered this short cut and they have no reason to go all the way around and come in the front driveway.  We can say what we want, they do not care. They open it in the morning, drive through, and leave it open.  (In the winter, we don’t even drive vehicles on our farm roads because they are so muddy. These guys are just trashing the place.)

Yesterday I decided to make it much harder to go through there. We still want to be able to take golf carts through, and we could put a lock on there, but what a pain. I tied it shut with wire and put a new sign up with more explicit instructions.  And then, not satisfied with that mild-mannered effort, I parked a truck right across the road. This is equivalent to filling their hole with sticks and rotten onions. They have to take note. They have to change their ways.  They need non-verbal cues.

Of course, today none of those tradespeople were working on the house so I did not get immediate gratification. But just as with groundhogs and deer and geese, you have to play the long game. That’s the only way to win.  All of these varmints and people have different goals and priorities, and they have to be discouraged through persistent effort. Killing them just doesn’t seem to be the real answer. And guess what? That’s what the book concluded too. They do have to kill the bears who have become killers themselves but mostly the answer to these conflicts is exclusion and co-existence.  The leopards are a real menace, and the trouble is that people are trying to live where leopards want to live.  At least groundhogs are not a danger to people.  The stakes in this fight are much less dire.  If it were me, I might be the one to move if leopards were eating children in my village.

Letter In a Notebook, Unsent

 (historical fiction)

June 12, 1975
Picnic Shed
Vienna, Virginia

Dear Mom,
So I got here, no trouble, a city bus drops us on the side of the highway.  I stood up by the driver and read the directions to him, he pulled over at the bottom of a hill and I got out in the middle of nowhere. Got on at 11^th and E in downtown DC and that's the last time I saw stores and traffic lights and people in normal clean clothes. It’s hard to describe this place. Been here almost two weeks, still not sure if I will make it through the summer but the people are nice and I would never survive without Sonya. She talked me into this and she is trying to make sure I am having a good time.  Everything hurts – my back, my skin, my face. Sunburn and poison ivy. Can you send a giant bottle of Calamine lotion? I don’t know how to buy anything and on my last day off I just slept all day.

I am sitting in this open shack in the woods. “The Picnic Shed.” A covered kitchen with one lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, a refrigerator, a stove, table and chairs. At night the bugs are crazy. They come in and bang all around the lightbulb, buzzing and circling and getting caught in my hair. We go to bed early.  I sleep upstairs in the shed down the hill in a big room all to myself, on a mattress on the floor.  There is electricity, but no running water.  The outhouse is just out to the left, and there is a bathtub in the outhouse but I don’t think I want to try that. The water gets pumped from the stream.  Salamanders everywhere. Yech.  We have been swimming in the pond next door at the end of the day. That’s as clean as we need to be. The algae doesn’t stick to my skin … I am glad about that. The water feels so good, and I don’t put my feet down on the bottom, disgusting.

Mornings we work in the field – carrying scratchy bales of straw into tomato patches, they weigh about as much as I do.  Then we spread straw around the plants. They are so picky about how the mulch goes down. It has to be flat, it has to be the same depth everywhere, no dirt can show through. They don’t exactly yell at me, but I am still not doing it right every time and I have to go back and cover the thin places. Why is this a problem. I do not know. And why is everyone else faster. I do not know.  My hands are covered with cuts from the straw, I have splinters in my fingers. It is steamy hot here by late morning. I have never been so hot. I guess this is the Deep South. I wasn’t really thinking about where this place was.  It is a sauna by afternoon.

There are four bosses – Tony and Hui (I have no clue how to spell it but that’s a woman’s name) and Susan and Chip -- and some people a little older than me who have been here for several summers and then about six of us who just got here.  Just about everyone went to Oberlin.  Who ever heard of Oberlin. Now I have, a lot.  No one has heard of any school west of Ohio and I am just keeping quiet.  Even the bosses went to Oberlin.  Everyone talks about co-op and we have a cooking and cleaning schedule made by the bossiest worker Edie, we have a schedule for milking the cow next door.  I myself have not milked the cow. That is too much. Some of these people have so much energy. It’s exhausting.

In the afternoons, that’s when we have the school thing that got me here in the first place.  It sounded neat when Sonya told me about learning all these Mother Earth News skills from real farmers. These farmers are not what I had in my head. No overalls. Tony goes barefoot, the other ones wear shoes. They make reading assignments. One was a college professor. One or another of them teaches for a few hours after lunch – I can barely stay awake for the whole talk. It’s so hot, even in the shade. We have heard about basic mechanics, bookkeeping, plumbing, taking care of farm animals that was very cool, plant propagation. Prop-O-gation? I never do any of the assigned reading. That is just too much. One of the guys, Steve, takes pages and pages of notes, and he does all the reading. So then he asks questions. I never ask questions. I can’t think of a question. It’s just too much.  We are about to start choosing our projects. I don’t know what to do. I can’t even hit a nail two times in a row. This is going to be hard. I might team up with another woman Lisa and we might make a picnic table. She doesn’t seem too sure about anything either but she is friends with one of the farm kids. The farm kids are sure about everything, even the four year old. They know how to do everything, they hang out with us, and they make fun of us when we don’t know how to do something.

I have to go to sleep. Tell Gram I am going to learn about beekeeping next week. That will make her happy.  Send care packages.  I need Calamine lotion, more bandanas and chocolate.  I myself have not been off the farm since we got here, but one person goes to the Safeway with Hui or Susan once a week and gets the rice and beans and cheese. I don’t have any money to spend anyway. We don’t get paid until the end of the summer.  Just ten more weeks…

I miss you and Dad and Tiger.  I miss sleeping in a room with windows that close.  I am pretty sure when it rains I am going to get really wet. Luckily it hasn’t rained since I got here.

Love, Loraine