A Bag of Onions

Posted by Holly at September 2nd, 2008

My friend Nancy, in Stockbridge, MA, usually sends out really interesting group emails that I read because; a) she doesn’t send them out too often, b) we agree politically, c) she’s smart and funny. Today was no exception. She circulated the one allegedly written by a classmate of the newly minted VP candidate, Ms Palin revealing her flaws (as if they hadn’t started emerging for me the moment I heard about the NRA and that she was a brigadier for Pat Buchanan’s anti-American Pitchforkers). A second email from Nancy was an apology for sending the missive based, I gather, on remarks from her friend George that it was too like the Republicans to play in the mud.

While I tend to agree with George and appreciate the higher ground taken by Barack Obama, my chosen candidate (and isn’t he smart to do that?), I’ve got to say, hang on a minute, George, sometimes we have to make a point out of outrageous behavior because, frankly, I think our democracy depends on knowing right from wrong and acting on that. Gosh, a couple of days ago I yelled at Jim for going through a Stop sign not because he went through it – who hasn’t done that on occasion – but because he told me he always goes through that one. Never, ever do that again, I yelled while wagging my finger, this democracy only works because of self-rule.

When I grew up, we were terrified of sex before marriage because we were terrified of babies too soon, babies before marriage or a hasty marriage based on the arrival of the baby and maybe not based on the love, respect, loyalty and trust we looked for in a mate. I’m a little beyond the stricture of the sex before marriage part although I observed it with my fiancé my first time around. I regret that we have given up that stricture, however, and tend to agree with Obama that what we now need to do is reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies.

There’s been a lot of chat this election about how the candidates are or are not like “me”. You know what? I don’t really want them to be like “me”, the collective me. Where is it written that somebody has to be out there drinking beer, chewing on Barbecue, bowling or sitting on the stoop kicking the can? How did “me” get to be the lower denominator anyway? I want a president who expresses the highest principles and ideals of honor, integrity, loyalty, and citizenship and says it eloquently. (Don’t even get me started on poor grammar or pronunciation. And, yes, I believe I have a right to hear the language spoken as it is intended by the rules of grammar and elocution. I love the evolution of language, to be sure, yet I understand it as a tool I can use to express my beliefs and, to that end, I want the tools to be the same and acknowledged by everyone.)

I don’t want a president or vice president who connects with “the people” on every level, thank you very much. Keep the connection zipped up on a number of levels that immediately jump to mind. I want the leader of this country to represent the office we can aspire to because it is something lofty and noble, requiring judgment, clear thinking, high levels of intelligence and education, moral victories over all those temptations that take us off a path of achieving our best potential.

And I want a leader free of hypocrisy and rationalization. Yesterday, Jim and I hosted the annual Labor Day party for our community. It was a gorgeous day and made so by the presence of our wonderful, down-to-earth neighbors. Believe me, we are all different and reflect just about every beam of the spectrum of political thought as far as I can tell from the liberal (guess who?) to the ultra conservative. Okay, so I’m starting to feel a little frenzied as I write this because the one thing I hate more than anything is rationalization. So here was how the conversation went about the about-to-be Palin out-of-wedlock grandchild …Me: So, what do you think about this pregnancy? My Friend: So? She’s not the only one to have sex out of marriage. At least she’s keeping the baby.

What? What? What? What? What? Come on. What kind of value is that? I was so shocked I agreed that, yes, it is a good thing that she’s not having an abortion and I do agree with that because I do believe in the sanctity of life – which is EXACTLY why I support abortion rights – so women’s lives are not jeopardized again with a coat-hangar mentality; I support peace over war – because I don’t understand sending people off to be slaughtered on killing fields; I support the search for alternative energy – so we don’t fry or freeze ourselves to death as we use up our food, water and fuel; I don’t eat meat or fowl ((yes, I eat fish and I might have to stop) because I can’t bear the thought of their inhumane treatment – yet I believe in the food chain.

My friend(s) who believe this is okay because “at least she’s keeping the baby” are guilty of the worst in us, the quick ability we have to justify stupid actions. Please don’t tell me you have Christian values, Jewish values any kind of values at all unless you are willing to call a mistake a mistake. God knows (yes, I believe in God, too) I have my share and, although in many cases it took a long time to understand there is peace and grace in admitting them, correcting them, learning from them, I do it. You are not going to hear me rationalize mine or others.

Ms Palin’s values needed to be vetted carefully by Mr. McCain and crew before they were held up to me as worthy of my vote. That he couldn’t do it does not excuse me from doing it and, since it’s the only way we are going to get the information now, let it flow through media, including the internet.

My vote will be cast for people who are smart and stand a little out of reach for most of us; people whose exemplary lives I can point out to the children I know as something, yes, they can strive for as long as they learn, embrace and practice the highest of ideals.

Posted by Holly at August 29th, 2008

In New York, a thousand years ago, when I officially worked for Jim, Friday nights meant getting off the elevator down from our 8th floor office at the second floor bar at Sardi’s. <"http://www.sardis.com"> Even though most nights there would be a group of us who stopped off for a drink on the way home, Friday nights meant most of us – no, all of us – observed the ritual of Friday nights at the bar. For the first hour and a half or so, there’d be us, the regulars, and the pre-theatre crowd in from the boroughs, the burbs or just up or down town. They had to weave their way in and out of our clusters at either end of the bar, waiting for the moment when we were able to spread out and settle in for the evening. In chummy fashion, we would chit chat over the trays of crackers and smoky tasting yellow cheese in crocks that Vincent had the bartenders and waiters pass around with drinks….probably to do his part for Broadway and help the theatre-goers absorb some of the alcohol they were drinking. It’s not easy throwing down a couple of Martinis or Manhattans in short order and then heading to see a big musical. Big noise can put you to sleep if you system is overloaded to begin with.

We had some good times there. Our crowd ruled, to say the least. We were smart and funny, raucous and elite in the finest sense of those words. There wasn’t much we wouldn’t do. Once, during the world series, our friend Frankie Brady, a lifelong/diehard Yankee fan, left the bar to go down to the corner hotdog man, buy some dogs with everything, bring ‘em back to the bar, take off his shirt and sit on the drink rail on the wall opposite the actual bar. I joined him as we watched the game and cheered from our “bleacher” seats.

A bunch of us figured out how to make phone calls from the maitre d station at the top of the stairs and charge them to Vincent. Friends on vacation in other countries would routinely get phone calls from us and we’d pass the phone around to everyone in the group, taking our time to share whatever local news and gossip there was.

Once – one of my more stellar moments – Joe, the bartender, let me get behind the bar and play at making drinks. If any of us ever needed to cash a check – this was before there was an ATM on every corner – the policy at Sardi’s was liberal for us. This particular night, when I was playing bartender, our friend Steve Martin (not the actor Steve Martin but, rather, the real Steve Martin) showed up and wanted to cash a hundred dollar check, which he handed to me. With my new power, I instantly denied him the cash and, to seal the deal, ripped up his check. Turned out it was his only check and he was furious with me, to say the least, but not so furious that he didn’t laugh.

Another night, when we knew the same Steve Martin had just shaved off his white beard (that, incidentally, made him look a lot like Kenny Rogers) I went to Eve’s Costumes and got as many white beards as there were in stock. We all had them on when Steve walked in. For the duration of the evening, he never said one word … and neither did we.

To this day, there is an annual reunion of our crowd on the first Friday of October and it is always at the second floor bar at Sardi’s. Fridays are sacred.

So I have to laugh at myself and how I spent this Friday, albeit an afternoon, but cozying up to a bar. Not an alcohol bar but an oyster bar. The local ag business, Wilco, <"http://www.wilco.coop"> that serves all the farmers around here does an annual oyster lunch for all of us who do business with them throughout the year. This is my third one. The business changed hands a couple of years ago and around late spring I started to worry that they would eliminate the oyster feed as a cost-saving measure. I started asking Jim around late spring if he thought they were going to do it again. He probably got tired of my agita over this. When the lime-green flyer invite arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago, I was really excited. I mentioned it at least once a day to make sure it got onto the calendar – sort of reliable – and into our memory banks – slightly more reliable. My taste buds were up, which was the most reliable of all reminders.

The first year, I put on nice slacks and good shoes. The second year I put on clean slacks and less nice shoes. Today I wore the jeans I had been on my knees in while weeding the garden. I did change my shoes from the black crocs to the sandal style. This year they didn’t barbecue the oysters because, they said, it takes too long for them to pop open. They steamed them in a bunch of good spices. We had to shuck them open, which only makes my mouth water even more as I hurry along trying to find the sweet spot that unhinges them. I stopped counting at the first dozen.

The bartenders – and most of the folks there, for that matter – tend to be less on the trim, city elegant side of the fence and more the portly type needing strong, red braces to hold up their work clothes. No designer jeans here. In fact, after something I saw in the NYTimes last week showing “Distressed Jeans” for $395, I’m thinking of putting up a pair of Jim’s on ebay and describing them as “naturally distressed from the blooming hill vineyard label”. This is a dry event, too, so there were no Manhattans, scotch and sodas or even beers. In addition to the oysters – although I don’t really understand why anyone needs anything other than oysters and, maybe, a little hot sauce – there are hot dogs (somebody forgot the buns this year), hamburgers, lettuce/tomato/onions, potato salad, beans, two kinds of chips, black olives, cut fruit and lots of cookies. Replacing the wonderful wood bar at Sardis’, the mirrors, the famous caricatures of actors and actresses, the red-leather seats of the bar stools, are long tables covered with blue plastic, rented folding chairs, and for backdrop are the big silos that hold the fertilizer for all the farmland around here. There’s a raffle, too, where you can win an owl statue to put out and scare the birds, some big clippers, wheelbarrows and chair seats shaped like a hand upside down with fingers in the air. You sit in the palm. It’s an outstanding event.

This is my Friday bar trip now and I lament only that it happens only once a year.

Posted by Holly at August 7th, 2008

I feel I should spend a few moments talking about peas, those sweet green pearls in their own environmentally safe wrapper and the current stars of our garden. I always heard you were supposed to plant your peas by St. Patrick’s Day but that was when I lived on the east coast and barely thought about planting more than a pot full of anything, let alone anything edible. I planted peas once on the windowsill of my kitchen on East 80th Street. It was a ninth floor window facing south and also was catty cornered to the dining room window so I could actually monitor the progress of my pea vine when it began to wind around the corner. In two years I doubled the yield of my crop from one pod to two. I guess it doesn’t really count as a crop.

I guessed that invoking St. Patty’s Day as pea-planting day had something to do with weather conditions. Now, on the west coast, I rely more on my farmer husband to stick his finger in the air and tell me when anything should be done. Our peas went in considerably after St. P’s Day. In fact, this year, the whole garden went in way later than intended because, through May and some of June it was COLD here. So it was iffy, in my mind anyway, whether we would eat anything locally grown.

Ah, nature. Everything, pretty much, took hold and even seems to have doubled its intention and is growing with gusto. Once the peas started to appear as little elves with their happy, plump leaf-arms waving about an inch above the ground, I got busy duplicating a trellis we had seen at the home of a friend. She wove twigs around sticks in the ground so the pea vines would have something pretty to climb upon. I loved it and immediately realized I could use our Curly Willow twigs that had once boasted lovely green leaves and out of which I had formed an arch in the opening between the living room and the hallway. I had to get rid of some them when it turned out they had aphids and the aphids were pooping (or spitting or reproducing) on top of the books in the shelves on the living room side. The now denuded twigs were still sitting outside the house with no apparent job so I conscripted them for the trellis, using bamboo stakes. It looked great Jim pointed out that the friend had only a few pea plants whereas we had a lot so my twigs wouldn’t go so far. He added red twine, the kind he uses in the big baler that automatically scoops, gathers, ties and spits out hay into rectangular packages in the field. Some of the pea vines are now shoulder high so it’s a good thing they have more than my six inches of twigs.

Here’s the thing about picking peas. I go out there and see that velvety green with little white flowers emerging from little caps, little peaky, elfin hats, lots of lacy tendrils and a beautiful curtain of green leaves in perfect shades of green and I think, hmmmm, not many peas today. Then I spy a pod, hanging like a dangling earring and I think, ahhhh, at least one or two will show up. Then, suddenly, there are four hanging there. Every day I wonder how I can look at a spot, think there aren’t any peas and all at once discover there are many. They hide. Maybe they have stage fright for the first few moments before they go on stage.

Sometimes I feel like a giant in the pea patch. Even though the vines reach my shoulders, they are delicate plants so, bending between the rows to see the pods on the bottom, or reaching over the trellis, I take care to be gentle with them.

Peas are old fruits (truth-be-told, they fit the description of fruit, not vegetable). I have learned that they used to be called pease and date way back, maybe to the Bronze Age and some have even been dug up on the site of Troy. I have been trying to figure out the rhyme Pease Porridge Hot and I don’t think I would want to eat pea porridge. Pea soup is another story. In the days when my late husband was so sick, when we were living in a magical place on the Hudson River and still close to my roots, all of my family still lived in New York. Thank heaven for them because I could not have managed those difficult and sad months at the end of Don’s life without them. My mother and father and grandmother were there every weekend and my mother stayed through most weeks. My grandmother’s family role, among others, was out nutritional nurturing and she cooked restorative meals for all of us as we kept our vigil. I think we all knew, but didn’t want to believe, that the restorative nature of the food would hold the family together but couldn’t save Don. Still, she made his favorites and mine, pea soup a constant and welcome meal. It was what I ate the night of the day he died and I can still look down into that bowl and remember how comforting that particular shade of green was to my aching eyes; how the soup felt in my mouth, so warm and thick with the remnants of solids that dissolved on my tongue in a very pleasant way; and, that something could still taste good to me. It was almost as if that lovingly prepared and served bowl of soup let me know I still had a future – although I didn’t even want one at that moment.

It’s been years since I tasted that pea soup of my grandmother’s – or anyone’s that can come close – and yet, here I am in my future and excited when I make my way through the rows of peas looking forward to their beautiful appearance, albeit brief, on our table, grateful for their promise fulfilled.

Posted by Holly at August 5th, 2008

It is hot. The cats are barely able to move around and I would so love to help them take off their furry coats for a while. It is 95*, as I am told by the flashing temperature icon on my computer.

Jim is up in the pasture baling the hay he cut and raked in the last two days. Yesterday he came in looking like a rust man, covered by the good red dust of the fields. He always says he’s whipped when he comes in but he’s usually pretty sociable after he’s washed away the dust and revived under the shower. At least he is as long as I can get a few calories into him as soon as he does come in. He approaches snarky otherwise. It makes me remember how I was often reminded that I needed a boost when my own blood sugar dropped – “Holly,” my late husband would say, “you need to eat an apple.”

We’re blessed here with apples, peaches, plums (although only a handful this year), wild berries and, of course, all those gorgeous vegetables growing their mopsy heads in the garden. We added a few things this year: eggplant, Brussels sprouts, leeks, spinach; oh, and jack-o-lantern pumpkins that are already the size of basketballs. Those are in addition to cucumbers, squash, peas, beans, lettuce and our soul satisfying tomatoes. All those babies are out there stoking up the sunshine and daily watering. We’ve been eating out of the garden for a few weeks, now; but, I have to say, it still surprises me that it takes so long into the summer before you get anything out of the garden up here in Oregon. Oh, well, never mind. It’s all delicious when it’s ready and we’ll have lots of food we put away for the damp, grey fall and winter.

I can’t even begin to tell you what the grapes look like. It’s a jungle out there! They are, in Jim’s word, vigorous. The trellises are heavy with the weight of the vines. They all seem to have thicker vines this year than last and the leaves are big and green. The grape bunches are almost hidden in the abundance of leaves. The vineyard is like painting a bridge: as soon as you get finished at one end, it’s time to start over again. The only difference here is that it’s usually a different task you start in on. It’s daunting to me and I only occasionally help out. I can’t imagine how Jim gets out there every day to separate vines that are growing the way they want and not the way he wants, disengage their strong and resilient tendrils that seem to have personalities and mean to thwart the best intentions; how he prunes and ties and coaxes the best out of his grapes. I can’t imagine how he is going to do twice as much once the new vineyard takes hold.

I think he’s happy, though. I think he regards the heat and the sweat, the swaying energy of the tractor under him as his tools and his badges of the work he does, which is partly to feed the horses, feed us and make wonderful wine; but, also partly to protect the land and use its resources well, without depleting it. We were working on the wording for a description of our vineyard today to be used in regional marketing and he questioned a phrase I had – simple and elegant – asking if that wasn’t contradictory. I tried to explain that I thought elegance was clean, pure and simple in the sense of uncluttered, unfettered. It is exactly how I see this farming life. I see in the cycles of the year the direct results of almost every action. Here there is no time for office politics or jockeying for positions of power; here the earth determines the power and we are allowed to turn its bounty into things that nurture the body and soul.

To me, it doesn’t get much more elegant, nor is anything else as simple as that.

Posted by Holly at July 31st, 2008

Where is the cleaning up the desk Genie? And the creating a perfect garden one; or, at least a perfectly beautiful garden even if it isn’t perfect. And where are the cleaning the house, doing the laundry – ooops, I’ll have to get up, now, and transfer the hours-in-waiting wet stuff to the dryer – and the dinner Genies? How is it that, with no daily, exterior job, I still never have time to get everything – sometimes, anything – done? Part of the answer is that my day, the part I devote to stuff I do and Jim doesn’t, ends when his day ends. When Jim comes in at the end of the day, it’s time to get food into him and we do like to cook together. It means, however, that at about 5 PM I’m pretty much done in the office, if I’ve even spent a good day here. Usually it’s like today: I spent the morning weeding before it got so blisteringly hot, sneaking in a few email conversations; phone conversations to make appointments or check on stuff we’ve ordered for the winery; paid a couple of bills; wrote some thank you notes; scooted around the web looking for various things like the best sites to sell antique books, new places to put this blog; sorted through the piles on the desk….

My revelation came a couple of days ago. In my previous life, the one in which I had an exterior office, I often didn’t settle in to the work at hand until 5 PM, after most people went home. That’s when the daytime flow stopped and there was concentrated time, at least a couple of hours. Not that my desk was much neater; it wasn’t, but my life certainly felt a lot more organized. I attempted to explain this to Jim the other day, when it hit me. He wasn’t especially keen to hear it, though; so, after repeating that I had this revelation three times and then asking if he had actually heard me, he grudgingly answered he had but it ended there. So he never heard my unspoken suggestion that I might be more productive if I sat here for a couple of hours in the evening.

I think I might have had a deeper insight into the women’s movement if I had led a life that kept me working in the home from the beginning. Oh, well, no more time to complain as our dinner will take a little forethought, four kitties are sitting here and looking pointedly at me and a dog is languishing near the kitchen door knowing his empty dinner bowl is on the other side….

Posted by Holly at July 5th, 2008

Maybe here is how to do it. I’ve just washed the kitchen floor again. When I lived alone, before I was married, I swear I didn’t have to wash a kitchen floor more than once every two weeks. Okay, I did work outside of my home every day and rarely cooked except once in a while for company so the floor didn’t get much use. But still. I do it here more than twice a week and, truth be told, it could stand it every day since we both track in dirt, mud and hay strands. But, since I do do it, I just figured out a new pattern that leaves me off in my office while the floor dries where I can do any number of things of interest solely to me like play Mah Johng on the computer or … write! Oh, the cleverness of me. Please, let it stay a little damp and grey out – as it is now because, after all, it is July 5th in Oregon – so the floor takes a little while to dry.

I am sure, if I had been married into this life 40 years ago, I would have invented the consciousness raising movement on my own; not the equal pay for equal work part, though, because Jim’s rate of pay is way too low for this kind of labor. I’m not complaining; although I realize it sounds dangerously like that. Really, I am just an observer and commentator on my current life, which, curiously enough, is filled with aphorisms deriving from the farm.

Jim lives and breathes by the weather forecast during haying season, listening to the computer voice forecast on the car radio many times a day and tries to figure out when he can be making the hay, not only when the sun is shining but so that it will sit out there in the field while the sun is still shining so it doesn’t get wet, moldy and rendered unusable for the original intent of feeding the horses. I wonder why he grows the hay, actually, instead of buying hay while the sun shines and save himself the anguish and frustration of the pesky weather and the vicissitudes of old equipment that falls apart frequently.

Also not complaining, I wonder why there needs to be an early bird to catch a worm. And there are. They start their singing just about when dawn is arriving which, at this time of year, is before 5 AM. I assume they are catching worms and I understand Jim’s urgency to get out of bed and into the vineyards because there are a lot of them to prune and trim and train and cajole into producing lovely grapes. Farm work revolves around the amount of light available and I get that. After two plus years of marriage, Jim sweetly brings the thermos pot of coffee and leaves if for when I do wake up because my brain does not gather itself into a thinking sphere until several hours later.

We did get up together every two hours for two weeks and then once a night for the next three weeks while we feeding the filly foal who was so sick. The only way I could really make it work was to put my clothes on the floor next to the bed not only in the order of which I would put them on but also in position. That way, with my sweat pants set up accordion style, for instance, I could muster enough cohesive thought to get into my clothes, out to the barn and perform the rote tasks involved in mixing the formula, filling the monojet syringes, and mixing up the medicines we gave to Ellie until she was strong enough to hold her own and began eating her feed.

It was a revelation to see dawn every day from that direction. My only previous experiences with dawn were returning home after a night of stepping out to jazz clubs when I was dating a NY newspaper jazz writer.

So here it is the Saturday of the July 4th weekend; day of rest today (if you’re of my Jewish faith) or coming (if you’re of Jim’s Catholic beliefs) and I’m feeling a little guilty sitting here and writing this because, by now, the floor in the kitchen is dry enough for me to go out the door, into the garden, take the hoe to the weeds and distribute used hay on the aisles between our 50 plus tomato plants to keep the weeds down. Don’t tell Jim, I did sneak in 45 minutes to watch the end of an old movie on TCM while I was making the bed and putting away the laundry….

Posted by Holly at June 24th, 2008

I did think I would have more time with less to do in it once I left the workforce. Now I think I want to go back to work simply because I probably used my time more efficiently with a job outside of the home; in this case, farm. It does seem as if I never just sit down to read something or write something without the looming, sinking feeling that there are a thousand little tasks that need to be completed that will, truly, run out of hand if I don’t do them. None of them tasks I wake up in the morning just dying to do, either. I mean, really, who WANTS to empty the dishwasher (again; didn’t I do that just yesterday?), do the laundry (again; didn’t I do that just yesterday?), iron (again; didn’t I do that just six months ago….)?

And my to do list is much shorter and less urgent than Jim’s. It almost seems like, for him, before he can actually DO anything, he has to fix the thing with which to do it. Today, he came into the kitchen clutching the tip of a grease gun and a little zerk through which he could no longer push the grease. He needed the greased zerk so he could run the mower to cut the hay, quick before it starts raining again, wets and rots the hay before it can spend five days strewn on the ground drying. Determining he needed a new tip, new grease ( a case), new zerks and a new hub for the gear box on the wheel of the 469 haybine – what am I talking about?? – I went off to the local John Deere store to acquire said items.

Usually, my initial trip with my list of things needed, meant to save Jim time by my going so he can fix something else he needs to do something else, uses up time because there is always some one thing or more wrong with what I get. Partly it’s because I don’t intuitively know what I’m looking for; partly it’s because Jim says “go get me a sawsall blade, it’s about this long. I need one for wood and one for metal” and it turns out there are 20 or 30 different sizes and shapes and some are for wood, some for metal but some are for both. We spend a lot of time on our cell phones when I go off to buy supplies and equipment. Today wasn’t too bad except I got the wrong size hub for the gear box.

Finally, though, Jim is out there on the mower and I am heading to do any of the following:

load the lunch dishes in the dishwasher; hand-wash the pot
set up a pea trellis using bamboo stakes and curly willow twines
water the wild flowers and sunflowers I planted
remove some of the garden debris from a couple of days ago before I start a new pile
cut the heads on the tons of parsley that has gone to seed
dead-head the iris down the driveway
pressure wash off the floor of the teahouse so I can treat it with oil and protect the wood

Probably shouldn’t be sitting here writing this but it is really the one thing no one else will do unless it’s I.

Posted by Holly at May 19th, 2008

Surely someone is thinking about how to manufacture vehicle fuel out of weeds. And, if not, then the scientists and innovators working on these projects have not spent sufficient time in a garden or even tiny plot of dirt including those that exist in the cracks of sidewalks. Weeds are everywhere and they are relentless.

I can see how people have a zen attachment to pulling them up and out. I do feel huge satisfaction when I get their roots to come up in one piece and when I finish a section and see how ordered it is, how the desired plants seem to breathe better and hold up their heads a little higher. I have to approach it in sections because if I look at the entirety of any area we have, let alone the farm as a whole, it is overwhelming and I immediately go inside and start to read my email. If, however, I just get down in there and start pulling, pretty soon I can let myself look around and see that something has been accomplished. This inspires me; for the next few minutes anyway.

Just that little section is so revealing. It just looks like dirt and weeds at the beginning but, quickly, the earthly inhabitants start scurrying as their homes are disturbed by all the yanking and rolling. Ants begin to flee; the longer bugs with the armor that looks like an anteater start utching themselves through displaced dirt to find new cover; bees that seem to have been silent suddenly start buzzing thrillingly close to my head. I believe the bees are checking out my activity to see if I pose any danger to them. There aren’t as many worms as I would have expected if ever I had thought about it. The ones that are there are usually very small and don’t make me jump. Now and then a big one shows up. I saw one that was about a half inch in diameter just yesterday. Worms and snakes probably have gotten a really bad rap but it works. They are slimy and seemingly without charm. Still, there is something remarkable about the ingenuity of their bodies to burrow and squirm.

Above my head, on the opposite end of the charm scale, the birds sing away, gentle bell tones on a still day. There is the occasional surprising sound. I looked up this morning to see who was hammering on one of the birdfeeder posts only to realize it was a blue jay pecking the floor of the feeder. It was loud. I thought it was the woodpecker we hear outside of our bedroom and, sometimes, in the chimney. That bird is so loud we did think it was someone hammering on the outside of the house.

The people-produced sounds are infrequent here compared to a city existence. Regularly, trucks from the rock quarry above us run up and down the road and, since the sound buffer of the berry plants is gone, we hear each one. I can tell if they are heading to or from the quarry and I can judge their distance from the turn to our driveway by the pitch of gears changing. It’s not unpleasant. Today I heard a plane overhead, very high and very loud. Seemed like it was traveling slowly, too, as the sound hung in the air.

Unfortunately, some of the weeds are quite beautiful. The one Jim calls retch and I call kvetch, is lacey with a tiny purple bloom that looks like a miniature iris. This one shows up as a circular weed – it’s amazing how many are circular – and sends out its runners from one middle point. Finding the middle often results in a whole bunch of the stuff de-entwining from its plant host, the one you want to grow without a weed companion. I think we should actually encourage kvetch growth in the working areas on the way to the barn where not much planting is going to occur and where the term hard-scrabble comes to mind. A carpet of lacey green with small purple iris-like blossoms might be just the thing there. I know, of course, it would take hold and be everywhere it isn’t already so that’s not a workable idea.

Another one is what I was pulling out this morning. It looks a lot like the alfalfa Jim grows up in the pastures for the horses. It’s a soft feeling leaf with a tenderly beautiful green color. Never mind that it is just everywhere in the freesias and tiger lilies and will eventually overtake them. I pulled out a lot of it this morning but I know it is only temporary as it is impossible to get the entire root system out.

Talk about roots, those really prickly weeds that are plague in the rose garden have thick, hard roots that hang on to the earth as if they were fending off an enemy. We put shade cloth down over the rose garden, cutting out holes for the rose plant. I could hardly believe the vigor of the weeds growing sideways under that cloth heading directly for the holes. The cloth had bulges. I spent a good two days pulling out those weeds – and a lot of other ones under there – only to go back the next day and have new bulges. How do they grow so fast?

That latter is what led me to think about them as fuel. I Googled weeds as fuel and discovered there is something called jatropha that is gaining a lot of attention as a biodiesel. The list of countries in which jatropha can grow is pretty big – nearly 110 and all over the place – Africa, Asia, North and South America and Australia. Puerto Rico is on the list. Maybe if they put together a huge jatropha industry they will be granted statehood. And, maybe, then they won’t want it.

Anyway, it has heartened me to know that there are solutions to our terrible crisis of the environment. A segment on a recent CBS Sunday Morning taught us that the LED has tremendous possibilities for a future lighted by solar energy.

None of this will be aided by my rigourous weeding except that it makes me think about it. Just like getting the job done one small weedable section at a time, I am reminded that I can help by recycling one more can, leaving off the lights one more hour, combining my trips and saving gas, and in a million other small ways that might just add up.

Weeds unite and help to power the world.

Posted by Holly at April 30th, 2008

First of all, I sat down to write about our Passover Seder and looked out the window to my left to see the dogwood blooms – a deep fuschia color this year – contrasted against a steely sky that has just sent down a shower of hail stones. It is April 29th and we are still suffering the slingshots and arrowheads of winter. In fact, on the day of the Seder when the sky was, again, sending down hailstones, I thought about the ten plagues to be enumerated that night and wondered, as I have so many times, is this a message from God? Will there be some kind of admonishment on the next plane of existence that we didn’t pay attention to what he was trying to say to us? On the theory that it could be possible, I would also have to say back to him that I spent a lot of time here on the early plane wondering why he had to talk to us in parables and signs. Why didn’t he just say it outright?

Which of the four sons would I have been had I asked any of those questions at the Seder?

For the third year in a row Charlie and I were the only Jews. We were nine at dinner this year: the Evans family (with 10 month old Finn who found the Afikomen early in the evening), our neighbor Dave who grew and ground the horse radish and Father David. Quite a group.

Passover is the best of the Jewish holidays in my opinion and that of many other Jews in the world because of the food. It was only upon entering into this mixed marriage relationship that I discovered that Gefilte fish and Matzoh Brie’s may be an acquired taste. It’s true that the fish has a distinctive odor so I always try to make mine a couple of days in advance of the Seder so the house clears out. For my first Northwest Seder, over two dozen years ago, I wanted to make my own fish so I called my grandmother to get the recipe. My dad was on the extension phone writing down what she told me. I wrote it down on my end of the conversation, too. My dad asked for clarification at a couple of points in the recitation and, finally, at the end, he was so intent on getting it right that, when my grandmother said to uncover the pot halfway for the last half-hour of cooking, my dad asked which half of the pot! We laughed over that for years and years.

When he sent me his hand-written version, he wrote at the bottom: “You think it’s easy?”, referring to the difficulty of transcribing a method of cooking used by so many grandmothers around the world – measure by eye, test texture by hand and add flavors by tasting. It’s the same recipe I use today only, as I learned that year, it’s impossible to get the Brooklyn version fish in the Northwest. So now I use sole, salmon and halibut instead of whitefish and yellowfish, whatever they were. Amazingly, it still smells the same.

The menu was a little different, too. Instead of roast chicken and brisket, we served deliciously broiled salmon (marinated in orange juice) and Boeuf Bourguinon that Jim made. Everything else was traditional.

I confess that I don’t clear out all of the chametz from my house anymore. Instead, I sell it to Jim for $1. That makes commingling with a non-Jew much easier. I sold it to him on the morning of Passover while we were standing at the sink brushing our teeth. I could see he thought it was amusing but also wanted to do it for me. I bought it back a week later, no interest.

This year, I decided on a centerpiece that was a little different than the usual flowers. This was partly because there was nothing in bloom in the garden, it was so cold, save a few small flowers. Cindy brought me beauties and I used those in a pretty vase on a side table. The real centerpiece was the Red Sea parting made possible by the clever use of those little hand-help personal fans and some sheer red fabric, formerly a curtain. It worked very well.

The Seder was delightful. Charlie led it, everybody read their appointed parts. Charlie and I recalled family moments for everyone including how long it used to take to get through the Seder. That, of course, was in the days when there were 25 at dinner each night of the two Seders and also when my grandmother would buy 100 dozen eggs for the duration of the holiday. Two of her Passover specialties, breakfast treats, required many eggs and we all clamored for them every day. One is the Matzoh Brie mentioned above. This is Jewish french toast made with broken up matzoh. It’s fried just the way you would bread french toast but with a lot of cinnamon. I think it is delicious and, along with matzoh farfel cereal, my favorite breakfast during Passover. The day I made one for Jim, the last day of the holiday, he politely and silently ate until he looked up and said “Is this how leftover matzoh is used up?”

Oh, well. He isn’t perfect.

Next year, if not in Jerusalem, at least more Jews at my table.

Posted by Holly at April 30th, 2008

My orange cat, Koufax, loves me. He sits in my lap, relaxed into the crook of my arm; so relaxed that it doesn’t even seem as if there is any weight on my lap. He doesn’t weigh very much, it’s true, but he is so comfortable in my arms that there is no resistance. Every now and then he reaches up with his tensile front paws in a big stretch. Honestly, he strokes my hair or my cheek. Then he reaches up with his mouth and kisses me…two little kisses with only his lips and one nibble. His six toes on each front paw make it feel as if he really holds hands.

He should probably have been named Campanella instead of Koufax because his paws do look more like catcher’s mitts than a pitching glove. He was named by the Brooklyn-born father of the woman I got him from who got him as a kitten. Her dad was a Brooklyn Dodger fan and, maybe because of his sandy color, named him Koufax for that famous pitcher. It’s quite okay with me. I even taught him a baseball trick involving sitting on command and then waiting, with a tempting pile of catnip in front of him, for me to say four words: ball, ball, ball, strike. On strike, he was allowed to have the catnip. This he did for years until I moved on to other pleasures and stopped practicing with him. He’s going into training soon, though, now that his nemesis Gemini, the dog, is learning how to read (he lifts his paw when I hold up a piece of paper that says PAW on it. Lots of doggie cookies are involved.)

My son will tell you I owned Koufax even before I saw him once I heard that name, being a die-hard Brooklyn Dodger fan myself, still waiting for them to return to their proper home. There are a lot of us. I once worked for Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the park that Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted considered their masterpiece because of the natural terrain with which it was endowed. There’s a statistic that one in every seven Americans has roots in Brooklyn and I once had the idea that if I could raise $1 – one dollar – from even one tenth of those people, it would yield millions for the park. I used to float the idea whenever I was at a party or in some public social gathering and I would come back to the park with a fistful of dollars from enthusiasts. Once, on a Friday night at my crowd’s usual hangout, Sardi’s, I went into my shtick about the $1 and the park and one friend said he would give me five single dollars if I would dedicate them toward rebuilding Ebbets Field.

I actually own Campy’s autograph and Sandy Koufax’s on a little fold-out card, about 5 x 7. It says Your Dodger Pals on one side and Your Other Pals on the other. Campy and Koufax are on the Dodger side, numbers two and three. Above them is Ramon Jackson. On the other side is Carl Furillo, Johnny Colon, Henry Mandell and Gladys Gooding – the only person to play in Ebbets Field, Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds. She played the organ at the games. I don’t really know who Johnny Colon or Ramon Jackson are and Henry Mandell is not a ball player. He was the president of the Men’s Club when that organization at Union Temple, the reform synagogue in Brooklyn at which I grew up, hosted an annual Orphan’s Breakfast that my dad ran. The words in these sentences are archaic today, a throw back to a time that was both more peaceful and more opaque, in which we didn’t think about labels the way we do today and were careless in the way we categorized people. Still, the intent was sweet – give a breakfast to support a bunch of kids who lived communally because they had no families; bring the kids together with everybody’s heroes, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Sam Levenson, the great comic – and another Brooklyn kid – used to MC the breakfast.

Still waiting for the Dodgers to come back to Brooklyn gave me the opportunity to root for the team in whichever city I was living. In Seattle it was the Mariners. In New York it was the Yankees (or, the Mariners East). I’m back to being a Yankee fan, now, since I live in a state that doesn’t have major league baseball. How can that be? It’s a shocking absence, in my opinion.

I love baseball. It carried rules for life when I was growing up about working hard to excel at something, about fairness and how you were chosen to be on the team according to your ability and not everybody got a chance to play and it didn’t scar us for life. I learned about courage with the Dodgers and Jackie Robinson. Baseball is remarkable for creating memories of a childhood. We – or, at least, I – recall sweet moments with my dad who would patiently explain to me that, yes, the players on the opposing teams were really friends off the field. Something I think about whenever I see two players, today, on opposing teams exchange hugs before or after a game. Baseball crosses genders. In 1955, the magical year, my mother was the only mother who had a transistor radio when we all played on the street after school and the moms watched from their bench position. My mother wanted us all to be able to listen to the games during the year that was finally Next Year. I once commented that there seemed to be more women at Mariners games than men. I looked it up and, statistically, Seattle does have a high population of female sports fans. Growing up, there was a woman who lived on the ground floor of our apartment building, with windows facing the courtyard, who rang a cow bell whenever a Dodger hit a homerun. I wish I actually remembered what that must have sounded like the day Gil Hodges hit four of them in regular innings in one game in 1950.

It might be spring on the farm today – finally after a long and wet and cold spell – and I might be headed up into the vineyard to prune grapes, but I can tell you I wish I were at a ball game. I’ll be listening to the sound of the crack of that bat in my head all afternoon. And, later today, Koufax goes back into baseball trick training.