I don't understand racism

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I don't understand racism.  I don't mean that I don't understand xenophobia or scapegoating or anti-immigrant feelings or other kinds of tribalism that are part of our standard human toolkit for fucking up social relationships.  I mean I don't understand why people of African descent get treated so badly, and why that bad treatment is so relentless and durable.

The Trayvon Martin trial is just the latest confirmation - showing as it did that a man can fear, stalk, confront and shoot to death an unarmed Black teenager who's minding his own business - without breaking any laws in the state of Florida.  To the shooter's jurors, it all seemed perfectly understandable and legitimate.

I don't understand the fever dream of contempt, fear, loathing and oppression that has burned unbroken for 400 years in the body of this country.   I don't understand the parade of delusions that we invent and reinvent to call down as much slander and ruin as we dare on these people: God's righteous wrath, evolution's slow lane, a species' atavism, a dysfunctional culture of poverty, crime and dependence, or history's damaged goods.

The Chinese, Indians, Jews, Irish, Poles, and next the Hispanics all make their way out, but never the Blacks.  We'll lionize a few - though mostly those who's success confirm the race's stereotyped failures - makin' that over-sexed music, sweatin' and shootin' those hoops, scarin' those white folks.

I don't understand why so many people build their hate filled politics upon the same timeworn caricatures generation after generation.  I don't understand why we have arrayed a vast, expensive, wasteful criminal justice (sic) system whose most durable feature is the destruction of Black people's lives.  I don't understand why we do everything in our power to make sure these people don't contribute their full potential to this society.

For what?  Why this stupid, violent, pointless waste generation after generation, century after century?

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Crème de cassis

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It's a good year for our blackcurrant bush.

The catbirds are too busy despoiling the raspberries.

These currants can macerate in some Stoli for a month,

before I have to decide whether they become 

blackcurrant liqueur 

or 

crème de cassis.

UPDATE: July 21.

I picked a last cup of currants off the bush and am making an attempt at blackcurrant jam.  I boiled the currants (a bit over 1 cup) with 1/3 cup of water for 10 minutes, then added a tablespoon of lemon juice and 2/3 cups of honey from the backyard and boiled harder for another 14 minutes.  Then I poured and sealed it into a clean, jelly-sized mason jar.  We'll see.

The smell of it has been bringing bees in to investigate.

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Red wine and peaches,

because it's summer.

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An Evolutionary Parable and the Age of Limits

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Here's an evolutionary parable: 

Salamanders live in a little kettle-pond.  Clearly the sensible thing to do is to stay there and eat and mate and thrive in the relative safety of the pond.  And so they do.  But a few salamanders are clearly not sensible.  They wander off from the pond.  It turns out that it would have been much, much safer to stay in the pond and almost all of them die upon the arid, predator-infested deserts.  But a few, with little but absurd luck to distinguish them, make it to other kettle ponds and their descendants settle there and eat and mate and thrive.  And a few restless ones wander off almost always to die.  But THEY are the reason there are salamanders - a hundred thousand and a million years after that first pond and all its inhabitants have reverted to dust.

weeds consume a chair

For a human and the culture they are delivered into, it is normal to accept the waters you are given, since they are to some degree safe and tested.  The malcontent, the maladjusted and the marginalized seem to offer little but cautionary tales.

We are not salamanders and our civilization is not a pond, but there's a relevance to my little parable if I could only pin it down.  John Michael Greer, writing at the Archdruid Report argues that people are locked into our civilization's central religious cosmology of Progress (with its dualistic alter ego, Apocalypse), and they don't give it up easily or at all.  If we have run up against an Age of Limits - and I think we have - then this cosmology has become dysfunctional and delusional.  And that is one reason why humans are not doing anything significant about the problems that threaten our civilization - climate change, our total reliance on over-exploited, non-renewable resources, our unsustainable and fragile food system,  and the accelerating destruction of the generative foundations of our biological existence like soil, air, water and ecosystems.  

The problem is not that we lack solutions for living upon the earth.  The problem is that most of these solutions are incompatible with our cosmology of Progress.  Let me reiterate that.  We have solutions, but because these solutions are - for lack of a better word - heretical -  they cannot be enacted (or for the most part, even discussed).  The idea that we should be intentionally applying our considerable creative and technical energies toward building a future that is slower, poorer, and less shiny than today's is so unthinkable that people mostly refuse to think it.

a volunteer sunflower

For example, we can easily avoid climate change calamity if we are willing to leave $4 trillion dollars worth of fossil fuel in the ground, bankrupting some of the largest, most powerful economic interests on earth, and bringing the engines of economic growth to a shuddering halt.  We could move past non-renewable resources if we took only what systems can regenerate and forewent the rest.  We can feed all our people if we reigned in population, discarded the worst of modern agribusiness and transitioned to a less wasteful, more labor-intensive steady-state food system.   We could put an end to our continuous economic crises if we abandoned the fiction of global economic growth and created an economy that could smoothly function with contraction.  After all, such changes are going to be imposed on us eventually whether we like it or not.

But we aren't taking up these kinds of solutions, and that is what makes us akin to those salamanders who stay in the pond even though ponds don't last forever.  It's the obvious and sensible thing to do, right up to the moment you are baked into the shattering clay.  

rusty wheelbarrow, made in USA

So what about those wandering, death-finding or death-defying salamanders?  the ones that leave the homely waters to populate new ponds and secure the long-term survival of the species?  do they have an analog here?  I'm not sure.  The mechanics of cultural evolution and biological evolution are very different.  I only know that we need more people wandering out of this Progress-puddle we are stuck within.  Greer makes a good case that the "long descent" will happen step-wise and take generations.  In my many interviews with people (far, far from the levers of power) I've seen more and more regular people questioning the cosmology of Progress, so maybe we will be able to take off the blinders and apply our energies toward crafting a good way of living in the Age of Limits.

We'll see.

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Independence Week

On Monday, we packed the boys into the car and did the long drive to Pennsylvania to deliver them to their grandparents for the month of July.  I had to sing to myself, because the radio isn't working because of some anti-theft device that was triggered when we got the car repaired.  Apparently the codes to restart a radio on a 1996 Honda Accord are beyond the capabilities of most digital archaeologists.  But we eventually cobbled together a system with Nico's old iPod.

When we arrived at my parents, stiff from the five and a half hour ride, Dad had made us spaghetti.  The sauce is a far cry from the de-jarred red sauces of our childhoods - full of elaborate flavors and chunks of vegetables.  He manages the kitchen despite being wheelchair-bound from a car accident over a year ago.  Finally, this spring, that injury cost him his leg below the knee, but he's taking the loss more or less philosophically and looking forward to a proper prosthetic.  My sister Chris was there up from Baltimore, where she's been settling into a new occupational therapy job after spending much of the past year tooling around the country camping, going to ashrams, and being voluntarily unemployed.  And my cousin Fred was there as well -- staying at the house for a few months until the Sesame Street Live tour picks up again in September and he goes back to his life as a dancer.  We ate out on the back deck under the oak trees that aren't dropping acorns on us this time of year.

My parents live in a low, long, log cabin - the fireplace end of it built out of large fieldstones.  Years ago, soon after they'd bought the 6-acre property they'd put in a two-car garage with an office and an upstairs apartment.  (They call it GASP, which is an acronym for something I can't remember, but is also the sound they made when they finally realized what it was costing them to build.)  But it is where the bodies go when the extended family descends.

photo: Chris Sholly, Lebanon Daily News

On Tuesday morning, Mom, who's active in the county Democratic Party, was going out to support her candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania - a local county commissioner making an (apparently quixotic) run for statewide office.  I tagged along both to spend some time with my mother, but also because she wants to contribute to the campaign by hiring me to do some consulting - and I'm looking to get involved in more direct advocacy.  So I met the candidate and we were both pressed into service as props behind her as she made her announcement upon the steps of the state capital building.  Anyone watching the evening news in Central Pennsylvania that evening saw me standing attentively at her shoulder as she gave her speech to the cameras.

In the evening we all went to see The Lone Ranger at the Allen Theater - a local movie house  in the old style.  The coffee shop half of it bustles and will sell you decent popcorn and soda or expresso.  A vigorous young organist tickles away at the little Wurlitzer like a living calliope while people find their seats.  The owner makes few welcoming announcements, the red velvet curtain opens and the movie shows.  The film itself, by the way, is a chaotic mess with enough going on to mystify and entertain and annoy everyone.  But we were in the mood to be entertained. (excellent review here)

On Wednesday, the others went off to Kutztown, where my sister Cathleen lives, to go to the fair.  I stayed home with Dad to do repair some footpaths.  There's a path down the hillside to a little creek, and a wooden footbridge that crosses it to the boundary of the State Game Lands.  From there  we can walk along the stream and up out of the ravine where the old Lebanon-Cornwall railroad bed has been converted to a rails to trails pathway.  But our own path was overgrown, so I took loppers and an ax to trim the encroaching spice bushes and hickory saplings and to remove a few logs that had fallen across the way.  As the footbridge replaces one that washed away a couple of years ago, it isn't in exactly the same spot, which means someone has to pull up ten feet of ancient, half-buried, rotted steel fencing that was now in the way.  And since my  Dad is one-legged for now, that meant me.  It was pleasant, sweaty, dirty work.

photo: Fred Mursch

I washed up and drove to Lancaster to see old friends to drink imported German beer and have elaborate Mexican-style salsas - which had been my excuse for not going to the Folk Festival all along.

Thursday was the Fourth of July, and with the arrival of the Kutztown contingent we made up an even dozen.  It was a classic, hot, summer day spent mostly in and around the pool.  The water was beautifully cold from the hose that was running into it to make up for a slow leak caused by an ill-advised pole-vaulting effort from a few year's back - (the repair now needs a repair).

My father has become an activist for planting native meadows, and the property around the pool is a-blossom with flowers --  milkweeds, bee balm, queen of the prairie, ox-eye sunflowers, pasture thistle, joe pye weed and more.  Swallowtails and fritillaries flit, and the bluebirds were fussing around their nest-box, complaining loudly.  A small black racer sitting comfortably in the box - head and tail-tip sticking out.  We thought the birds might have laid their eggs already, (the first brood have already fledged), but when the snake slipped back out among the flower stalks it showed no tell-tale bulges.

My home-town was holding its 196th consecutive Independence Day celebration in Lititz Springs Park (though it's true that the 1863 version - with the cannons of nearby Gettysburg almost audible - was a muted affair).  A powerful spring wells up in a round pool and rushes out a stone lined channel to a fountain at the other end of the park.  On the Fourth the stream is roofed by wooden frameworks and trestles, covered with thousands of white candles.  After a senior from the high school is ceremoniously crowned the "Queen of Candles" she lights a torch that passes to boy scouts and other kids who scamper around lighting wicks.  I watched them wade into the frigid pool to ignite floating platforms in the shape of swans.

Photo: Fred Mursch

Later this old-school pyrotechnics gives way to the modern - one of the best fireworks displays you'll find in the US.  Synchronized to music, the show blasts away over the thousands of people crowded onto their blankets on the ball field below.  Leo - nearly three years old now - sat in my lap awed by the display.  But awe for three-year olds is fleeting and soon he was jumping up and down on Fred and head-butting Nico.  And Bridget, who's nearly 5 fell asleep through the deafening grand finale, and had to be gathered up and carried for the long, shuffling departure.

On Friday, Monica, Cathie, Eric and I went to a riverside festival in Harrisburg to see an old friend of mine playing in his band.  He and I used to be best friends and play chess in Kindergarten but by high school he was reading chess books and I couldn't manage more than a win out of three.  He's in a band with another old friend, Trixie, who's a music teacher, and they play their excellent and eclectic music once in a while, where people gather who expect more from a band.  The crowd in the breezy park was small, but it grew as the hour-long set went along.  After the show, the musicians had to leave, since music doesn't pay the bills and the van-owner had to go to work.  So the four of us went to a late lunch - or would have if we hadn't come first to the brewpub with 120 varieties of craft beer.  Much later they went in search of a Peruvian restaurant, while I went off famished to get reacquainted with a friend who'd disappeared off to Indiana thirty years ago.  And I ate stromboli and we talked long of kids and careers, divorces, migrations and the changing of plans.

Saturday morning I helped Dad load up a dump truck that he'd finagled a roofer-friend into leaving for the weekend.  A decade's worth of junk accumulation - at least all of it that couldn't be recycled - went up into it for the trip to the dump.  But by 11:30 I'd discarded my filthy clothes, swum, showered, and cooled down for our long drive back to Rhode Island.

It was a deeply satisfying visit - a week leavened and enlivened by the important things in life.

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A Matter of scale

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Weeds in bloom

A spider waits in the goldenrod

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Beekeeping Update: putting on supers

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My three colonies are all building up at different rates.

The northernmost hive is the most bustling - and making full use of the current nectar flow.  The bees have filled two medium supers with honey, most of it apparently already capped. (Supers are the boxes that sit on top of the brood chamber - and from which I will steal the honey.)   I had to quickly add another box before they ran out of space entirely.  That was my second to last super, so if they keep going I'll either have to get my hands on the bee club's honey extractor or buy some more woodwork.  Into it I put my last two frames of drawn comb, 5 new frames with wax foundation, and 3 empty frames for them to just hang comb in.

The middle hive is also bustling, though they've only filled one super and are still working on drawing comb in the second.  That one I can leave well enough alone for now, I hope.

The southernmost hive is the laggard.  I did put a super on a couple of weeks ago, but the bees are not very active in it -- still outfitting the brood chamber below.  It's hard to examine inside, because I made a hash of things setting up.  In the bottom box I'd had some comb that bulged out and didn't fit, and another slot that was empty which they filled with comb.  Now it's all glommed together so it's impossible to really move the frames around to get a look.

Still I opened the top brood chamber to take a look and make sure there is plenty of brood.  Unfortunately, the second frame I pulled turned out to be a medium frame - I don't know why it was there - but the bees had diligently filled the several inches below the bottom of the frame with comb.  That tore apart as I pulled the frame out, so, yes, I could see there was brood there in the most unfortunate way possible.  I put it back, closed up and left them to repair the damage.  That hive I may not open again.  If they do put honey in the super eventually, I doubt I'll harvest it, but just leave it on for winter stores.

I'm not sure why there are such differences.  The flight path out of the beeyard tends to go off to the northwest, so probably the northern hive gradually accumulates more returning foragers.  Or that queen was a replacement and maybe she comes from somewhat different stock.  The southernmost colony is from a package that came two weeks later than the others, and has a queen that from the start didn't seem to lay eggs in the tight pattern that beekeepers prefer.  The colony has never seemed as active as the others.  But also, the hive is more tucked under the trees and in the shade.  Last year the colony in that hive was the first to expire, so I may relocate it next year.

Anyway, that's life on the beekeeping learning curve.  When you start a new colony from package bees (as I did for all three of these) you generally don't get much, if any, harvest.  But unless these bees decide to eat it all in the July dearth - it looks like there'll be honey to steal this summer.  

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They're gettin' hitched in California

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Friends in San Francisco who wasted no time in taking advantage of California's new freedom to marry.

Congratulations to the both of them - and to all the others that have been clogging up the City Halls around California this week and in the weeks to come!  

Harvey Milk couldn't be happier.

. . . countdown to August first here in Rhode Island . . .

. . . and about friggin' time . . .

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"It's fine" and the Language of Olds

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For years now, if we offer the boys something and they decline, they'll say, "It's fine."

Like: 

"Do you want some more smoothie?"

"It's fine."

And every time we say:

"What's that mean - 'it's fine'?"

"No, it's fine, I don't want any smoothie right now."

But we don't break them of the phrase, and I asked Monica, who's off running around the lakes and hiking trails with kids all summer, whether other kids do that.  "All the time," she says, "and I'm always like, I don't know what you mean, 'It's fine.'"

So this is what it's like to be old and annoyed by the language choices of the young.  We baffled and bothered our elders with our own innovations -- replacing "say" with "is like" for example.  So what goes around comes around.  Ah well.  

Nico listening to an old person

Working on the Long Descent

Ed at Gin and Tacos, lambasts the stupidity of a Price Waterhouse study that criticizes "Gen Xers" for not getting with the program.

Tsk-tsking at the younger generations manages to magnificently miss the point.  This is what economic contraction looks like.  But no one wants to even imagine what the end of economic growth means, so we keep pretending to each new generation that they can have it as good or better than earlier generations.  If that's not working out, then there must be some mysterious flaw in them or their strategies.  They're not working or they're complacent or they're not as assertive as the union-members of the past.

But the contraction's been going on a long time and it's been working it's way up the through society, like water dissolving a pyramid of sugar.  It's reached people, who did what they were supposed to and got an education, who worked and sacrificed for careers, who even saved and invested - and who are much worse off than they'd expected to be.  And it's moving up past them - removing the possibility of the old imagined success even further away.  (Years ago someone like Ed might look around his milieu and see some people succeeding and some failing - but now he looks around and he sees no one who has built the kind of career they'd been lured on with.)

The powers that be keep printing money and flinging it onto the top of the pyramid, but it doesn't do anything there really.  It's not being invested in anything but financial tricks, because people down the pyramid not only don't have money to spend on some new product, but they are being idled and underused in an economy that doesn't know what to do with workers other than employ them to provide crappier and crappier services to one another at narrower and narrower margins.

Increasing income inequality may be speeding the spread of contraction, but I don't believe it's the cause.  It's the powerful trying to hold onto their privileges as the proverbial pie shrinks.  (We should push back or course . . . )

This is the second time already this week, I'll try to imagine advice I'd give, but I'm  getting restless with critique.  After all, I have a fifteen year old son, and what will I tell him?

Learn to do something that even people without much money will pay for.   Don't count on a wage to meet your every need.   If you don't have a family network to invest in and draw from, try to find a way to put roots into a social network.  Know that the older generation doesn't understand the economic world we live in even though they will judge you as if they do.  Take advice (like this) with a grain of salt and look around.   Find the things that you value - especially those things within your means.  Again, see what you can do with your hands and brain that people will value.

There's more I could say, but a 15-year old will only stand still for so much advice.

What would you say to a person setting out?

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Whip-poor-will

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In the pre-dawn I was awakened by a snort from the young buck that's been haunting the yard.  But I lay in bed for a moment listening, because a whip-poor-will was calling out from the woods.

whip-poor-will -- whip-poor-will -- whip-poor-will -- whip-poor-will -- whip-poor-will 

It's a call I haven't heard since dimly-remembered childhood.  I put on sandals and walked into the wet grass glancing up to see if the great perigee moon was still out.  It wasn't, and there was no sign of the deer either.  It might have been watching me from the shadows.  The bird continued its clear, insistent call.

whip-poor-will -- whip-poor-will -- whip-poor-will -- whip-poor-will -- whip-poor-will

I walked to the edge of my garden and peed in the tall grass - as an affront to the buck - then walked back inside and crept into bed.  I listened. The whip-poor-will eventually fell silent and there was a time of silence before the dawn chorus began.

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Getting your news despite the news media

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I rarely listen to the mainstream news, because it is riddled with so many assumptions and unspoken claims that I vehemently disagree with.  Reporting on government is all about politicians jockeying for advantage rather than about actual governance or the systemic corruption that has mostly replaced democracy.  Reporting on the environment thoroughly ghettoizes any talk of sustainability away from all the things that we are supposed to value.  Economic reporting deals almost entirely with the concerns of the rentier class - stocks, investments, the "creation" of jobs and so on.

It's not accidental, of course.  We have a mass media completely in the hands of enormous corporations, which are mostly funded by delivering eyeballs to the advertising of other large corporations, overseen by a regulatory system that is nominally in the public interest, but co-opted at every level by corporate influence.

When was the last time you watched the news and saw information on how to form a union - or found out about other ways that employees were successfully insisting on things that suited their interests?  How about the idea that avoiding catastrophic climate change almost certainly means leaving fossil fuels in the ground and ratcheting back on the culture of consumption?  As for the political system, the media will deplore the state of our democracy, but only in ways that encourage people to double down on the constricted channels of present-day partisanship or else disengage entirely.

If an anti-consumerism were to germinate (whether rooted in environmental sustainability, Christian anti-materialism, or some other rejection of our deeply unsatisfying culture), how could it possibly thrive in a media environment that is entirely built upon delivering consumers to businesses?

The solutions?

Pay for the product (rather than being the product).  I chip in $15 a month for the New York Times for straight national and international news.   Reading the products produced at the NYT, the Guardian, and the Independent will keep one up to date on most of the major events.

Support publicly funded media as an alternative.  The effort by politicians to push PBS and NPR out of the public interest model and into the corporate advertising business model has been mostly successful.  But there is still potential to re-claim that portion of the mediascape as our own.

If you are really motivated to understand what is going on around you, get your news from non-corporate sources.  The blogosphere may be a raggedy crazy quilt of information, but it's also richer and more self-correcting than the main media sources.  Grist and Think Progress do excellent environmental  and general interest reporting.  For the progressive version of politics and punditry, Balloon Juice, TPM or some of the writers on Daily Kos keep a smart, critical eye on things.  You can find smart, informed, critically-minded people out there on any subject you care about.  Chip in a few bucks when you can.

There's more news out there than I could ever possibly digest or interpret, and it takes some work and practice to navigate.  But until we can actually construct and maintain a media industry that serves us (rather than serving people who don't mean us well) I'll have to do it the hard way.

Deer Alarm

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sunflower, stripped by the deer

In the foggy morning, shortly before six I heard a pair of venison outside the window snorting like they owned the place.  

I don't know if a man running at them in bare feet and a blue bathrobe can really strike enough fear into them to keep them away from the plum trees for very long - but I'll do it every morning if I have to.

It's not really such a bad way to shock the body awake -- a pair of cold, dew-wet feet.  Probably healthier than coffee.

Death among the parsnip flowers

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Here's a welcome creature nectar-sipping at my parsnip flowers. 

 Trichopoda pennipes, called the feather-legged fly.

Another bane for garden pests.

Drawn in by blossoms of the carrot family, 

she'll stay to hunt the squash bugs.

FInding one unwary, she'll lay an egg or two beneath its plated abdomen.

A hatching larva will burrow in and set to drinking up the tissues of its host.

A happy maggot soon bursts the carapace of the victim bug, 

leaving it to die.

feather-legged fly

But in the meantime, this feather-legged fly had best beware,

Because among the florets lurk those thirsty eight-legged killers.

A spider has snagged an unwary wasp and drinks.

But this gorging huntress had best beware, 

because orange-marked spider wasps

(Arachnospila)

are in the parsnip flowers and they have eggs to lay.

She'll sting a spider with a paralyzing venom, and drag her off down snugly to a burrow,

where she will lay a single egg within the body.  

Sealing off the burrow, she'll fly away to hunt again and drink of flower nectar.

And the grub, hatching in the dark, following its instinct will eat around the crucial organs, 

because the spider, after all, is still alive,

and it wouldn't do to have it die and rot before the wasp is ready to emerge.

But even in that spider flesh, the larval Arachnospila had best beware.

For there are carrot wasps among the parsnip flowers.

A carrot wasp (genus Gasteruption)

She drinks the vanilla'd nectar of the flowers now,

but soon she'll want to lay her eggs.

Needle-like she cannot sting - that spike has other uses.

A wasp or solitary bee has a hidden stash to feed its young - 

perhaps a buried, living, grub-infested spider. 

She finds that stash

and that long spike slides down the burrow and leaves a solitary egg.

Her invading grub may eat that spider and if it can, a burrow-mate as well.

(On what basis do you expect to find this universe in the hands of a 

benevolent god?)

Valerian weed

From the start of our time here, I'd noticed a pretty weed in a couple of spots around the yard.  The glossy, but unfamiliar green leaves made me think that it was probably an ornamental.  Given the chance, deer would chomp off the flower heads, which made me suspect maybe it was a native plant.  But lately I'd also noticed that it was starting to spread, so I enlisted my sister (who's good with wildflowers) to identify it for me in case it was some invasive that I'd regret allowing to get established.  

It turned out to be Valerian - one of the great herbs of the ancients.

By the time of Hippocrates it was already well known as a cure for insomnia and depression - a status that modern science has validated in its turn.  The foul smelling root is dried, ground and made into infusions -- (or in modern times placed into less-foul-smelling capsules).

It's also valued by gardeners as a source of phosphorous for the compost heap, since the plant draws up and concentrates the mineral in its tissues.

I may dig up and dry some roots as a way of getting my herbal apothecary's toolkit underway once again - (if only to see if it's as bad smelling as reputed).  We used to keep a medicine cabinet of herbs when we lived in San Diego, but got out of the habit when we moved away.  And I guess I'll also make a point of throwing the leaves and stems into the compost along with all the nitrogen-rich vetch the garden's been generating.  I'm sure the garden soil can use the help.

longhorn beetle on valerian flower

A Mournful Thyris

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Here's a pretty little moth.  

A Mournful Thyris (Pseudothyris sepulchralis) resting on a milkweed leaf.  

One of it's host plants is clematis, 

so I can thank the neighbors for this one.

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Eat your Weeds!

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Lamb's quarter, ready for eating, stems and all

Many of my garden weeds have no redeeming characteristics that I'm aware of, particularly the grass and the sedge.  I suppose the vetch is a good nitrogen fixer, but it aggressively smothers all in its path.  I've heard chickweed is edible, but haven't made a study of it yet.  Wood sorrel is nice for the occasional nibble, though not in the quantities that spring up upon every inch of soil here.

Purslane

But among my weeds are some true gems that I've been actively encouraging - namely the purslane, lamb's quarter and sheep sorrel.

Michael Pollan once called purslane and lamb's quarter "the two most nutritious plants in the world." Purslane is a creeping succulent weed that adds crunch and a hearty flavor to salads.  Sorrel adds a lemony tang as well as vitamins to salads, soups or stir fries.  

Yesterday I had to thin and weed the beets, so at dinner we had lamb's quarter and beet greens sautéed with a little garlic and sorrel.  

Blades of sheep sorrel

Curly dock with pokeweed behind

Personally, I think lambs quarter outclasses any other green.  As a child the only greens I would eat where lamb's quarter and its cousin, a wild amaranth we called red root.  They are both mild, but hearty.  Throw in some mustard leaves for heat.

I also have curly dock and pokeweed, though not in the garden.  Both are too mature now, the dock too bitter and the poke downright poisonous.  But I make note of where they are because in march, their early leaves are the first salad of the year.  I still haven't tried the poke, but the dock was a mild, tender leaf more delicate than lettuce.  Mixed with some early dandelion leaves (which I find bitter) it's delicious.  I can only imagine how delicious it must have been to people who'd had no access to fresh greens through months of winter.

Horsehair worm

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From the puddle on the cats' drinking stone, I pulled out a maple helicopter and little bit of string - like a piece of silk from an ear of corn.

As the string began to writhe and knot itself I saw that it was a horsehair or gordian worm, (named for its likeness to Alexander's famous knot). 

There are over 300 species of these parasites that grow inside the bodies of crickets and grasshoppers and other insects.  As they mature within as a larger and larger knot, the insect gets thirstier and water-obsessed until zombie-like, it is ready to drown itself in a body of water.  And when it does, the knot unwinds and an aquatic horsehair worm bores its way out.

They're harmless to pets and humans, though I knew perfectly well Monica wasn't going to allow me to put this one back in the cat's drink.  I hadn't the heart to dump the creature in the grass, so I put it into the rain barrel.  Maybe it will find a mate and if I water the garden with the million eggs of grasshopper-zombifiying gordian nightmare worms so much the better.  I prefer my garden to be a predator-infested hellscape for my arthropod pests.

Inequality, Toilet Paper and Hungary behind the Iron Curtain

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For a long time in our work we've been researching and crafting strategic communication about policies to reduce economic inequality.  It is never easy because most Americans viscerally dislike the idea.

Recently, I was reminded of a run-in I had in the East Bloc nearly 30 years ago.  It was the summer of 1985 and I was bicycling around central Hungary with my friend Melissa.  This was at that time still well behind the Iron Curtain.  For most people outside of Budapest, we were the first Americans they'd ever encountered.  On one hot afternoon we had stopped in a little town upon the central plains to forage for food in a local, poorly-stocked bakery.  I went to use a public restroom nearby.  There was a stocky, gray matron in the dingy foyer who took a few forints from you and gave you four squares of toilet paper.

The few flimsy squares hardly seemed adequate.  Since there wasn't much to buy in rural Hungary, and our Deutschmarks had bought plenty of the local currency, I held out some coins gesturing for more paper.  ( I knew a half dozen words of Hungarian, none of which availed me here.)   Her formerly blank gaze flickered with annoyance and she shook her head.  I held out more coins, and she grew visibly upset, quivering with anger.  She wouldn't have anything more to do with me, so I continued in toward the toilets with my four squares of paper.

It was only much later that I understood this collision of world-views.  Toilet paper, like everything else, was in short supply in mid-eighties Hungary.  According to the socialist ethos, each person deserved an allotment of what did exist.  I had naively walked into that foyer with an attitude that I deserved to have more - triple or quadruple my allotment even - because I had money.  This was as obvious and self-evident to me as it was disgusting anathema to her.  Clearly, in her view I didn't deserve any elevation of privilege just because I had pockets full of Deutschmarks.

Her attitudes toward equality and privilege were fairly common in an older generation who had seen the Communists knock down old structures of class and oppression and bring a kind of rough equality that - however imperfect, hypocritical and self-serving - did actually improve the lives of many Soviet bloc citizens, especially women, workers and rural people.

It was a perspective lost to the younger generations already even thirty years ago, who saw socialist virtues made mockery by the gross corruption of their elites and the conspicuous wealth of the capitalist West. And it is a perspective that simply cannot be part of public communications here in the US.  Nearly all Americans are hostile to ideas of economic equality.  On the contrary, the Economy - like God - is supposed to be one of the great arbiters of merit and success.  The economy "works" when inequality is distributed in just and proper ways - when people get what they deserve.  The lazy poor suffer the edifying lash of deprivation; the hard-workers apply themselves to move on up within the American dream; that genius who builds a better smartphone makes her millions.

The fact that our Economy generally doesn't work that way - the lazy and corrupt prosper, while hard work goes unrewarded - is certainly outrageous to people.  But to the confusion of many advocates for greater equality, the terrible and persistent injustices that are inherent to our system don't mean that people think there should be less inequality - just that inequality should be more appropriately distributed.

I doubt very much that my old washroom attendant ever got on board with that.  I wonder what her grandchildren, if she had any, made of it.

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Paddling the Pawcatuck river

My sister came by for a visit after a week of camping in Maine.

We spent an afternoon paddling on the Pawcatuck river 

which runs through the woods and marshes behind our house.

We saw herons and turtles and water snakes.

And a couple of beaver kits that were swimming near their lodge.

(Here's Porter after he swamped his kayak squabbling with Nico.)

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