Wendell Berry

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
That possibility you were.
More and more you have become
Those lives and deaths
That have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
Containing much that was
And is no more in time, beloved
Then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
Standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
Generous toward each day
That comes, young, to disappear
Forever, and yet remain
Un-aging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
Not to give yourself away.

--Wendell Berry

Temps: 69/30
Wind gusts of 40+ mph
Garden clean-up and some planting. Had a late corned beef dinner today with parsnips from the garden. Tomorrow we'll try red flannel hash with MacGregor's beets also from the garden!

Happy Weekend

We just got back home from an out-of-town installation, so I'm taking the weekend off from computer work. See you in the garden, where we'll be planting peas and potatoes.

My poppies are just starting to show a bit of green. Here you see two varieties from two years ago - Oriental poppies are red, and just behind them, breadseed poppies in purple. The breadseed poppies didn't come back last year despite vigorous seeding, so we'll see what happens this year. Probably just my guardian angel looking out for my well-being. Some of you will know whereof I babble.

Lovely, sunny day today although the breeze was a bit crisp. Mick got the potting bench set up in the pump house, so we'll be starting seedlings all weekend.

The Spirit of God

It was a long day and we were out-of-town on an installation for most of it. I lit candles at the church, mostly for all the suffering people in Japan, and for all the challenges the world will face because of natural and man-made catastrophes there. I also lit a few candles for all the dreadful people claiming the Japanese are being made to suffer for some sin that they feel they are qualified to judge and declare. I'm truly appalled by such idiotic comments. I lit one candle for my own sin of condemning them to some unspeakable fate. If I were God, they'd be in Hell already, so it's just as well I'm not.

I like and agree with what Henri Nouwen says in the book Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith (p. 48):

I learned that Protestants belong as much to the Church as Catholics, that Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims believe as much in God as Christians, that pagans can love one another as much as believers, that the human psyche is multidimensional, that theology, psychology, and sociology are intersecting in many places, that women have a real call to ministry, that homosexual people have a unique vocation in the Christian community, that the poor belong to the heart of the Church, and that the Spirit of God blows where it wants.  All of these discoveries gradually broke down many fences that had given me a safe haven and made me deeply aware that God’s covenant with God’s people includes everyone.
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It was almost like summer today - projected high of 77 at home, but closer to 80 degrees where we spent the day, almost on the Kansas border. Way too hot for mid-March to my way of thinking.

Running With Two Hats On

Today is a conference call with Little Pickle Press, one of my clients, and it's a connection I have with the team every Tuesday for two hours. But also on my mind today is Mick's church window installation over the next two days. Here's my job; getting photos, billing, making sure all the stuff we need is set to go to the job site. It's a little frantic today. Here's St. Luke, patron saint of artists, who'll join the other three evangelists in the children's section at St. Catharine's of Siena Catholic Church in Burlington.

Can This Be Spring?

Look at those temperatures for two whole weeks. Makes me want to get out into the garden and start plucking back the mulch to look for signs of life underneath. So far I haven't seen much green, considering the hundreds of tulip and jonquil bulbs scattered over the property. I'm anticipating the arrival of some of these beauties soon:

Desiderata #10

... in the noisy confusion of life

keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,

it is still a beautiful world.

Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Desiderata by Max Ehrmann

Clean Energy Park?

Last week, my friends at Country Roots Farm in the Arkansas River Valley sent me their new CSA newsletter and in it they urged all their fans and readers to read up on the nuclear plant being built in Pueblo, Colorado.

Cattenom Nuclear Power Plant

Say what? Billed as the Colorado Energy Park, the 25,000 acre facility would be situated smack in the middle of the richest farmland in southern Colorado where a huge portion of the state's small farmers grow vegetables and fruits for farmers markets and large retailers like Whole Foods... a nuclear facility? Tell me this is a joke.

But apparently it isn't. It's a case of business chasing Obama-bucks. According to one article: The Obama Administration wants to triple the already $18.5 billion appropriated for new nuclear reactors to $54.5 billion in America’s 2012 Budget, which is being decided any day.

You can bet more companies will be ready to fill the bill with those kinds of dollars at stake. This is one subject in which the president and I do not see eye to eye.

One can only hope that the disastrous earthquake and resulting damage to Japan's nuclear plants, and the subsequent heating of reactors (not to mention an explosion at one facility) will slow down the forward-thrust of any nuclear movements around the world. No word at this writing whether radiation contamination is going to impact large portions of Japan, but I suspect the world is watching with growing concern. Easiest way to prevent this in America - just say no to nuclear. This is not an over-reaction. The issues of long-term health and disposal of spent reactor plutonium have never been properly resolved.

But let's not let such concerns stop us, right? We can also barrel forward and support the proposed Canadian uranium mill in Paradox, also in Southern Colorado, which plans to sell "yellow cake" (used in nuclear bombs) to Asia, including Korea. (www.denverpost.com/news/ci_16943858) Let's all pretend we've gone totally and irrevocably NUTS and get behind these insane projects.

No, let's not.

Please contact your U.S. and state representatives and register your negative vote. You can also contact the White House to tell them to shift those billions to renewable energy, with some left over going to restore programs for the poor, environment, sustainable organic farming (including in Colorado), children, students, and Planned Parenthood. 202-456-1111.

Lastly, contact Secretary of the Interior and former U.S. Senator Ken Salazar to voice your concerns. Call (202) 208-3100 or e-mail: feedback@ios.doi.gov . You only have until March 15 to try to put skid chains on this and other potentially environmentally damaging projects planned in Colorado.

E-news Channel

JUST SAY NO TO NUKES.

'Mater Heads

I have tomatoes on the brain. It usually happens this time of year, when my garden stash - either canned, frozen, or stored on vines - has been eaten. I'm forced to buy grocery store tomatoes, which are essentially just pretend produce. Looks like a tomato, feels like a tomato, tastes like nothing. Even when they are ripe, the grocery store tomatoes, bred for travel and not taste, are a huge and unspeakable disappointment.

Fueling my tomato fantasies are the Black Prince plants in my kitchen and dining room (from a hailstorm-save last autumn), vigorous growers that we recently topped to create four more plants. I have six gorgeous two-foot beauties ready to go into walls of water, and one of my favorite varieties no less! I planned to leave you the link at Baker Creek Heirloom seeds where we originally bought these, but they are out-of-stock! This particular plant has either caught on in popularity, or they had a seed-growing disaster last summer, so no stock. Another reason for saving your own seeds each year, something you can only do with open-pollinated seeds like these. Here's the technical information:

An heirloom from Irkutsk, Siberia. The 5-oz. tomatoes are round and very uniform; the color is a wonderful deep blackish-chocolate brown. The flavor is as deep, sweet and rich as the color. A unique salad tomato; the plants produce a large crop and early; a good tomato for fine markets.

The Black Prince is pictured top right in the gardener's hands. Look at the color!

But this is only one variety of dozens we grow, which end up on the plate looking like a still-life water color. Does that just make you drool? All of these, despite their unusual colors, are vine-ripened. What a feast to the eyes first, then the palate, and infinitely appropriate in an artist house like ours.


This is so simply delicious, one hardly needs a dressing to embellish the salad. Another favorite is an old-fashioned sandwich with homemade mayonnaise and bread. It's a treat I can live on the entire month of August. This year, I'm hoping we can time our first sunflower oil production to coincide with mayonnaise and tomatoes - more on that later. I also plan to can up a good-sized batch, because we often use tomatoes in cooking, and so it makes sense to have great-tasting ones from my own storehouse. Our friends, Mark and Lauren, make their own pasta for dinner parties, and simply add  home-grown and home-canned chopped tomatoes with a drizzle of good olive oil as a simple sauce. With a light sprinkling of Parmesan cheese, it's delicious!

Can I carry on much longer about this? Why, yes, I can. Here are some tomato babies in my kitchen right now. Look at those beauties - grow, little ones, grow big and strong so we can eat you!

That sounds quite dreadful, but they really love hearing this, and I swear I can see them stretching themselves skyward even as I speak the words. Okay, so I exaggerate. Hehe.

What about you all? What's your favorite tomato to grow? And to eat? Or even to throw?

Food and Water

There's lots of disturbing stuff in the news lately, with collective bargaining rights taken from unions in Wisconsin, the unemployment rate in Colorado over 10% for the first time, and riots all over the world. Scary times. But even more concerning is all the low-key noise about food costs and possible shortages. I know that's been bandied about for years, but suddenly it seems much closer to reality.

When I first moved to Denver in the late 70s and was married to a newly-minted water engineer, there was much talk about the Ogallala aquifer, that vast body of ancient waters that feeds a multi-state region in the center of America. Even back then, talk of rapid depletion and lack of government oversight to manage its use, was a common topic in certain circles.

I'm somewhere over that blue section in eastern Colorado, where center-pivot irrigation rules, and water costs are still darn cheap despite the writing on the wall. I don't think I've ever paid more than $100 a month during the driest summer months, and we have very large gardens on this two-acre property. There's a lot of water waste in the area, along with oil consumption, another unsustainable practice that won't last many more years. But now, the depletion of the aquifer, and not just this one, is taking center stage because food supplies are decidedly connected to this region. It is, after all, called The Breadbasket for its wheat and corn commodity crops, which don't just feed America, but the entire world.

People in this country can't fathom the idea of starvation, and certainly not in mass terms, but there are signs of impending crisis. First we have rapidly rising food costs, which are fueled by decreasing cheap energy costs and the destruction of crops by severe weather patterns. Both of those issues aren't going away. In fact, they'll likely get worse. Add in the above-mentioned water depletion and what will the future in a few decades look like? What will life be like even in five years?

Signs that may people are anticipating some changes (and some of us don't think it's such a bad thing) is the move toward vegetable gardening, the increasing legal changes allowing livestock in cities, and interest in open-pollinated seed stock that allows the farmer to harvest his own seeds rather than depending on seed companies. There's also a burgeoning movement among the young to preserve and store foods for future consumption, and it's not just for health reasons. Fewer citizens are trusting the government to take care of them, and planning ahead to take responsibility for their own well-being. It all sounds kind of like the fifties, doesn't it? We can only hope life will be as good as it was back then.

For us personally, life won't change much over the next few years, except to maybe do more of what we're already doing. We'll inventory our seeds and add to those, as we do every year. We might add a small greenhouse to the property, some more cold frames, and try a high tunnel to moderate and extend growing season. We'll have to figure out how to handle the grasshopper plague without chemicals. Maybe we'll figure out some sort of collaborative effort with neighbors to exchange produce and share ideas. We're also going to try to grow a good-sized stand of oil sunflowers and buy a press to manufacture our own cooking oil! That'll be a first for us.

Those are just a few thoughts. The biggest and best change, of course, would be to live somewhere all of our efforts would be easier! Somewhere with more rain, more kindred spirits, more resources. I just haven't figured out where that is yet. Got any brilliant ideas?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Temps: 62/26 Suddenly a late Spring day!
Writing: 4 pages
Dinner: Aloo Gobi with peach lassi

Reading Mentors

An embarrassment of riches.

March is Women's History Month and today is World Read Aloud Day, and the two got me thinking about someone very special to my life. My German Oma. She was really my first mother, since I lived with her for a time when I was a young child.

Oma was the wife of a very prosperous barge owner and captain in Selesia/Prussia, now Poland. She was his second wife and married him, a widower with three daughters, in her late twenties. She considered herself lucky to be married so late in life. They had four more children together, three daughters including my mother, and the only son, my Onkel Gunther. Oma was widowed when her youngest was two-years-old, and went to work as household help for a Jewish family, but she had her house and her land, so was relatively well off.

My mother was the youngest, and when she was 14, Oma and she fled the country during WW2. They hid all their silver and china in the chimney of the attic, let the animals loose, grabbed small travel bags with paperwork, and hopped the nearest train with hundreds of their fellow citizens. They figured they would be able to return soon.

That didn't happen. Oma lost her home and land to an unknown Polish family (they found out later when the Berlin wall had come down and travel to East Germany was again open), and in West Germany where she settled on the German/Austrian border, she lived as long as I knew her in two rooms with a bathroom she shared with several other renters. I never got the sense that she resented losing a grander position in her life - just that she was grateful for what she had, which included a comfortable pension for the rest of her retired life, a roof over her head, and enough money to take care of herself and buy gifts for her grandchildren.

Today, what I love in life and how I live is in large part influenced by my Oma. I love small spaces and clean, bright places to spend my days. No big houses for me! Especially don't ask me to sleep in one. Simplicity is a concept I chase everyday, and that comes from my grandmother, too. There was not very much complicated about her. Not her diet. Not her interests. Not her wardrobe. Not anything. These are the habits I vividly remember about her: Quiet moments of daily meditation especially after meals. Having to take a regular walk. Always with a book near at hand for reading throughout the day.

Oma loved her "crimmies" and like her, my favorite form of entertainment is a good cozy mystery book. It's definitely in the blood. I can't remember now whether we shared this love when she was still alive and I was a teenager. I certainly was a reader through childhood, and I sometimes wonder if she noticed and was secretly amused or pleased by this.

So today, on World Read Aloud Day, I thought it fitting to pay tribute to the German woman who gave me my love of books. Vielen Dank, Omi. I shall read a few words of German to her in honor of this true heroine in my life. 

“Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.”  Christopher Morley (1890 - 1957)
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Temp: 52 degrees and all the snow has melted

Writing: 2 pages (500 words)

Reading: Crying Blood by Donis Casey

Shrove Tuesday

Or Fat Tuesday at my house. I'm eating everything in sight that has flour and sugar in it because that's what I'm giving up for Lent. I take advantage of this fasting season more for my health than any religious observance, although I was raised as a Catholic. So I'm very familiar with the procedure.

Historically, religious fasting is a practical action intended to make starvation seem admirable. This is the time of year when food sources were scarce in old times, animals themselves were so lean they were hardly worth the energy of hunting them, and making believe some good could come from a growling stomach was a wise and maybe even life-saving practice in tribes.


That's my opinion about it at any rate. Pardon me if it sounds irreverent, but I'm a bit practical about these things.

Anyway, I'm going to do the self-sacrificing thing (don't I feel noble already?) and cut out the two major food groups in America, white flour and white sugar. My hips will slim down, and likely I'll have all sorts of other health benefits. I dare you to join me!

But today, my friends, we eat! Pizza tonight and then I'm making chocolate chip cookies and after that, I'm going to eat the whole dang batch in bed while I read. I might even read a bread cookbook or something equally decadent. This Land o' Lakes recipe is really excellent, and you can easily cut it in half. But who would want to? Look at that yummy thing!

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Temps: 29/18 with snow all day
Writing: 800 words

Snow!

Please, heaven, let this be the last snowstorm of the season. I am ready to garden! Look at this nutty weather. It's been up and down all winter, like a yo-yo.

Tomorrow I'm posting Mick's excellent chili recipe - perfect for a snowstorm.

It's Fat Tuesday, too, and I intend to eat everything I shouldn't since I plan to give up white meat, white flour, and white sugar for the Lenten season.

Desiderata #9

Therefore be at peace with God,

whatever you conceive Him to be,

and whatever your labors and aspirations,

in the noisy confusion of life

keep peace in your soul.

~ Max Ehrmann

Greer Studios 2010

You Know You're From Colorado If...

You'll eat ice cream in the winter.

It snows 5 inches and you don't expect school to be cancelled.

'Humid' is over 25%.

Your sense of direction is: Toward the Mountains and Away from the Mountains.

You say 'the interstate' and everybody knows which one.

You think that May is a totally normal month for a blizzard.

You buy your flowers to set out on Mother's day, but try and hold off planting them until just before Father's day.

You grew up planning your Halloween costumes around your coat.

You know what the Continental Divide is.

You've gone off-roading in a vehicle that was never intended for such activities.

You always know the elevation of where you are.

You wake up to a beautiful, 80-degree day and you wonder if it's going to snow tomorrow.

Every movie theater has military and student discounts.

Everybody wears jeans to church.
 
A bear on your front porch doesn't bother you.

When people out East tell you they have mountains in their state too, you just laugh.

You Can Go Back Again

I ran across an interesting thing at the Overseas High School online page at Facebook. Being able to connect with fellow alums from the school after almost forty years is pretty amazing in itself. Military brats, at least when I was growing up, always expected to move on and lose touch with their high school friends. That held true for decades until the Internet became a reality for all of us. When I went to a 25th school reunion in Las Vegas, it was kind of a miracle... not as cool as I thought it would be because many of my peers didn't go, but still, it was kind of a bittersweet kick.




So today, I found pictures of some of the housing areas where I and friends lived. These, however, were after the Army base closed and the Germans took over the properties and rehabilitated them for sale to German citizens. And billed them as luxury homes.




I never really thought of where I lived as a luxury, but I suppose the size alone throws these homes into that category. Standalone or duplex housing is very expensive in Europe, so you can see why these old officers quarters likely fetched a pretty penny.

Above is a huge back yard by German standards. Even the apartments below were luxuriously large.

Hard to really see much through the fence, but it seems lighter and cleaner than I remember. There were hundreds of these buildings in one housing area.

I have to say the attractiveness of the places is much higher than when I was there. Germans just intuitively know how to make things gemuetlich.
Keep in mind that for Europeans, apartments like this with their larger square footage, hardwood floors, large balconies and surrounding real estate, were really quite a boon to average lifestyles. The end apartments were four bedroom and two bathrooms, which is very spacious.




There were a lot of Army bases housing thousands of families, so returning this to the German economy had to be a big benefit for them. Only fair, I guess, since we took the land to begin with after the war and during military occupation.









I haven't seen these buildings since I left c. 1970 so it's kind of like visiting an old home. The Internet is an amazing place, and thanks to technology, you can go back again. It certainly brings back memories!

Blooming Good Times!

What a delightful surprise. I've had a couple of orchids from a few years ago, and wasn't sure what to do with them after the blooms were spent. So I kept them. After two years, I suddenly have new flower stalks and blooms. Here's the oldest plant today:

I've done nothing special except give them three ice cubes every Saturday after tea. In fact, the Phalaenopsis orchid is now dubbed "the ice cube plant" when it's sold anywhere and everywhere including discount stores for as little as $9.99. It's a bargain because the bloom season is 3-4 months on one stalk. I love them for their elegance. Here's more information about growing and caring for them. The picture below is when she had several stalks all blooming at once. Simply glorious!

It's nice to have this touch of Spring since the temperatures have dropped from 50 to 25 and we're expecting cold rain turning into snow tomorrow. Gack - I am so ready for winter to be over!

The Man Who Planted Trees

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now." ~ Chinese Proverb

When we first moved out here to the flats, one of our immediate goals was to save the existing trees on the property. The house had been empty for a year or longer, and lack of water left many of the trees seriously stressed during several years of drought. So we pruned and watered and coaxed and were able to save the lilac bushes in front as well as an old poplar, to name a few.

We also planted trees and bushes we favored, like the cedars bordering the driveway, which are now 4-5 feet high, and a lovely cotton-less Cottonwood, for it's soothing rustle in a summer breeze. It's a marvelous sound to sleep by! That tree can now be seen from the backside of the house over the rooftop, it's grown so tall. Probably not the best choice for this water-thirsty area unless they're part of a gray-water system, the house needed a tree there and these happen to be one of my favorites, so we bought a 5-foot baby, and delighted in watching it shoot skyward over a few years.

The landscaped area we call Leona's Garden (there's Mick working on the urbanite wall) for the woman who inspired it, has developed nicely in just five years, and is backed by the neighbor's windbreak, as well as a large and unidentified tree I call The Old Dame. That's the tallest tree you see at right. Before I leave here, I'm going to identify what she is. No one seems to know.

Leona's Garden two years ago

The bare beginnings -Leona's Garden five years ago

You can see the developing Leona's Garden, with various Evergreens, a Russian Olive (which is a designated invasive tree here), rose bushes, and assorted peach and apricot trees I plant with relentless enthusiasm every time the fruit passes my lips. Last summer the pampas grass stand finally shot into the air like a fountain, and has been quite the dramatic sight all winter.

There are lots of Dutch elms on this property, the weed trees that proliferate without much coaxing, but have been virtually demolished by Dutch Elm disease over recent decades. I rather like them, and in this stretch of barren land, I appreciate their visual relief. We've lost one of the huge sisters, and it looks like the other on the south side of the house will die soon from elm beetle infestation. I hate to see an old tree like this die, but you can see the wound and seepage by the stain on this snow.

We'll have to cut her down later in the Spring. The thought makes me cringe. The only consolation is that it will make room for dreaming about a greenhouse addition to the side of the south side of the house. If we were planning to stay here, which we're not. But still... a girl can dream, right? A greenhouse would just be so handy right now for starting seeds and pretending Spring had really sprung.

Time flies when you're gardening, that's for sure. Were it not for the space we've created here, I probably wouldn't/couldn't have stayed this long. I need green and beauty to survive! So we've created it - by planting trees and other good things.

For an inspirational novel about the topic, read The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono.
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Temps: 55/25 but with a brisk and cold wind - didn't feel this warm at all
Writing: Blog posts

Highlights of the day: A great batch of chili by M., I made a nice pound of mozarella,  and baked a loaf of whole wheat bread that was also perfection. Lent starts next week so I'm indulging in the kitchen. I'm giving up flour, sugar, and white meat. I don't eat enough red meat to sacrifice it and feel like I'm actually doing anything worthwhile. But the carbs - that could be a challenge. So 40 days and nights of dairy, eggs, cheese, and vegetables.

National Pancake Day

Guess what we had for supper?

It's also National Peanut Butter Day but we didn't smear that on the pancakes. There's only so much national pride I can muster especially when it involves stuffing my face with food.

It was a gorgeous day today so I washed all the bedding and hung it on the line to dry - sweet sunshine smelling sheets - say that three times without breaking a tooth!