MamaStories

Today we came home from Amie’s cello lesson to this:

We could not believe the size of that giant pumpkin! There were also bags of more pumpkins, goopy pumpkin guts, and a couple of gourds. The latter I would have to cut up somehow,  they’re so hard, or maybe I’ll try drying them for bird houses.

The haul filled up the wheelbarrow and much of the compost bin. Once I get the shredder going I’ll fill up the gaps in the bin with shredded leaves.

The neighbors are really into the orphan punkins this year. Maybe I could get a more elaborate system set up, a large three bin system down the hill, near the mailbox, where they could drop off vegetable kitchen scraps? A neighborhood composting facility… And once we get chickens,  we would doubly appreciate the scraps. Mm…

I’m going to ask my tree removal neighbor for all his wood chips from now on to do this in the  veg garden. I could easily fill up those garden paths with wood chips and leaves. These paths erode so badly, especially the ones that run in the direction of the (slight) slope. It would also keep the weeds down, and be a haven for the worms. A permaculture function stack!

What a day today was. 65 F and sunny. The bees took the opportunity to take some cleansing flights and dump out some more dead bees, and we got to go outside too, to rake leaves, and leaves, and leaves, and play…

Today I pressed the dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) tincture that I started on 14 October (roots and leaves). It has been sitting in my herbal medicine closet (dark, cool and accessible) for over three weeks (14 days is the minimum). I shook it twice daily. It has become a saying in our household: “Mama’s shaking her tincture!”

This was the first time I pressed a tincture and good practice. I now have an idea of how much comes out of a quart jar (15 1 ounce bottles) and I know I need to get hold of a high glass pitcher with a good spout – one that won’t have the sieve sit in the liquid and won’t spill the tincture all over during pouring. I didn’t have muslin for sieving, but the cotton handkerchief did the job quite well.

The tincture is a murky, swamp-green-light-brown. There’s a lot of residue in it, which stresses the need to shake that tincture each time you use it. It has a particular sweet smell underneath the whiff of alcohol (80 proof), a smell mostly in the tip of the nose (how’s that for observation!). It tastes only a tiny bit bitter, but mostly that sweet smell translates to the tongue. It actually doesn’t taste that bad – not like lobelia tincture, for instance, thank goodness.

The following is what I’ve gleaned from several herbalist sources:

Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)

Cold, bitter and sweet.  Affects the liver, bladder, stomach, spleen, and skin. As a bitter, both leaves and roots stimulate appetite and digestion. They are diuretic, so they are used to treat urinary tract problems, and unlike other diuretics, replenish potassium. Dandelion stimulates bile production (in the gall bladder), so it fights gall stones  as well as the liver’s lipid (fat) metabolism, fighting jaundice and cirrhosis. The choline in the roots stimulate the mucous membranes of the large intestine to a mild laxative effect. Roots are also good against rheumatism and arthritis. As a blood-purifier and blood vessel cleanser and strengthener, it is good for eczema. It is rich in calcium (especially the root) and will recalcify bones. Externally it can be used to treat fungal and yeast infections. When applied to warts, the latex (the bitter “milk”) will – they say – cure them.

{DISCLAIMER} This information is intended for educational purposes only and has  not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not intended to prevent, diagnose, treat, or cure any disease.

And after that disclaimer I must add that it feels good – empowering – to make my own remedies, in my kitchen, from the dandelions I grew and harvested. Still, hopefully I won’t get so many and so much of the above ailments so as to need all 15 ounces of tincture!

Amie’s drawings are always changing – see the Drawing As It Develops series to follow her drawings from the beginning. She is nowadays mostly interested in human figures, especially herself, and is experimenting with movement and joints, etc. And there is also always text, in invented spelling.

Amie picking up a leaf.This is a month or so old. She was getting her head around spaces, and wanted to represent them here by lines. The next drawings are more recent and she seems to have the hang of spacing now.

This one she drew in her cello book. She said it is for when she is grown up. Then we can look in this book and remember her. I said her own kid, when he or she starts cello, will see this drawing too. She thought hard about that. She is always saying “When I have a baby…”

This is a letter she typed for DH, with a drawing. Then I was very sad because I didn’t get a letter, so she added a message for me to it. She had just discovered the question mark. It reads: “satra (dad’s name) I know you love me and I love yu too do you like my drawings? Mama do you love me? Do you like my drawings? You and Baba to share”.

These are her bird dolls – the one’s you squeeze and they sing their song. The birds don’t have feet because the dolls don’t have them. This was when she had just been introduced to initials. I love that invented spelling!

The Fall peas never had a chance to blossom – my fault, I planted them too late. But during a garden tour a friend pointed out I could still eat the shoots. Lovely just like that and in soup and salad.

Also baked Daily Bread No.12. It sang when I took it out of the oven.

And all the rain barrels are stored away now. Emptying them is challenge, since I don’t want all that water puddling around and eroding away the soil and stones the barrels are standing on. The solution is a short hose, of course, but I made the mistake of storing that on the hose reel underneath the 50 foot one… A loose gutter was the solution.

Lastly there are the pumpkin orphans still coming in daily. I’m not even cutting them up anymore, most are well on their way to collapse.

A week or so after my “I need to do something!” moment I stumbled across Wendell Berry’s essay “American Imagination and the Civil Way”. It pretty much answered my question, “But What?” The answer was Transition, of course, or more generally speaking, going out there and talking to people.

This one’s philosophical. I hope you don’t mind.

~

I believe “American Imagination and the Civil Way” should be read in the schools. It is insightful, candid, and moving; Berry at his best. It has many aspects that I find fascinating and worth discussing, also in the context of Transition, but here I want to concentrate on that one, the one about talking.

Berry writes that when opponents become enemies, they can no longer imagine one another. Then the only way their relationship can go is the way of generalization, and ultimately of violence.

Now I’m a introverted person. I live in a little house on a little hill where I do all my work – I mother, write and garden. I chat with the moms at Kindergarten and my neighbors and family and friends. Very rarely do I come across any serious disagreements or “personality clashes” or even differences of opinion. I’ve been writing about some pretty difficult issues,  yes, but to a generality, an “audience”, who does not confront me.

But with Transition, I’m going to have to go out there, with my neck. This is another aspect of Transition that has always frightened and (so far) paralyzed me, and one that I need to deal with now: How am I going handle opposition?

~

When I face someone in a discussion/argument who doesn’t agree with me, will I regard him as an opponent or as an enemy? Will I dare to really face him, that is, accept and imagine him for who he is,  particularly as that unique person with a history and a personality largely unknown to me, in which his opinion is rooted? Or will I retreat and see him only as some X who opposes my view, like all other Xs who oppose it, and will I thus stop imagining him, to see only his opinion and the fact that is is opposed to my own?

Will I be imaginative, or defensive? Will I see one particular person with an opinion, or will I just see one opinion that is against me in the way of all opinions that are against me?

In the first case, it is about us, him and me, and getting to know him, and imagining his reasons for holding his belief, and finding a solution, maybe by changing his mind, or my mind, or finding some common ground (all of which need to be imagined). In the second case, it is all about me. I am the only individual and particular self around, and all the rest is reduced to the general not-me, against me.

~

This is what I see happening around me, especially in the media (which I shun for that reason), the rigid isolation of what Berry calls “the isolated, displaced, desiring, despairing self”. Berry brings home the despair of this person, who has only enemies, by quoting John Haines:

you will always be waiting

for what you do not know,

knowing that when at last

it appears you will not know it.

You will never know it, because you can’t even imagine it.

~

I know it is how many people are, how they will approach me as I go out into that world. And I know I can be like this too, because I am afraid to even look. This brings me to another crucial aspect, which Berry brings up in the essay “God, Science, and Imagination”: “By it [imagination] we may see ourselves as others see us.”

That reflectivity is crucial, of course, because how else would I really imagine the other as he stands facing me and my opinion?  But there’s something else: Do I dare face myself? Do I dare imagine myself, this new person who talks with people?

As for myself I am aware that when I find myself in a opposition with a stranger, I admit it, I fear him. Not just him, but myself as well, caught up in that infinite rebound of our reflections of each other.

It is a failure of my imagination all round, ad one that I have to address, with courage. Because when I will go out there, I will be facing two strangers. Him, and me. And when the talking is done, I get to go home with one of these strangers.

What an adventure we will have!

A friend came by today to pick up straw bales for his garden  (I also gave him the quince atchar he supplied the quinces for, and my infamous apple peel jelly). He asked me why I am trying Transition again. I couldn’t quite answer clearly. I’m not clear in my head about the many causes and reasons and motivators. But one, I just realized, is that I want the pressure off myself.

I have always thought I want to grow as much food as I can for my family. I still want this, but two gardening seasons in my garden have changed my idea of “as I can”.

For one, the garden itself – the soil, the amount of sunlight, the presence of peckish critters – is not yet up to growing as much as I want it to. This will change in the future as I work on the soil fertility and judiciously take more pine trees down to replace them with fruit and nut trees, but that’ll be a long haul. And secondly, the gardener too will need some improving. That’s me, yes.

Then there are issues of livestock (no chickens yet) and food storage  (no root cellar yet, did very little canning this year) and even food preparation (no cob oven yet).

I know, the “yet”s say it all: have patience, these things take time!

But I am in a rush, and in the time that I feel I might have, I can’t get it all done. Not on my own.

And so, there it is: Transition, a whole community moving towards one big garden and food pantry.

You might say, hold on, that’s exchanging one kind of pressure for another. Just April 2011 will be a lot of work and worry for me, and that’s supposed to be only the beginning!

But here’s something that also contributed to my starting up again: I have changed my expectations for Transition in my community. I’m no longer expecting my whole town to go Transition like these towns in the UK have done. I remember at the Transition Training, a year ago, watching those UK success stories and thinking “I can’t make that happen!” I’ve accepted that now. I can’t make that happen because America is a very different place from the UK, and as a European who has lived here for over a decade, I should know.

But to find just a few people interested in a few topics of Transition, like growing more food, keeping chickens and bees, canning and foraging for herbs together, skillsharing, etc. would be enough already.

This bread is so good. We had it with homemade pesto (last harvest of homegrown basil) and the last Brandywine tomatoes.

Tomorrow if I am feeling better I’ll pull all the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants from the hoop house, chop them up, and mix them with the orphan punkins, of which we received three more today. The neighbors are really into this!

Found the next batch of orphan punkins under our mailbox, and a bag of rotten apples too. What must the neighbors be thinking?! Oh, wait, it’s the neighbors who brought them here!

Along with out Jack-O-Lanterns it makes for a big haul of soon-to-be-compost.

So I’m not going to be able to bake a bread every day, but it’s cool. Taking advantage of the hot oven, I also baked a punkin pie, using this wonderful recipe (but with canned pumpkin puree). I can’t show you pictures because it’s mostly gone already. I may become a (modest) baker after all. Still looking for that no-knead whole wheat, though…

The tomato vines in my hoop house have started dying, so I pulled the last tomatoes, 2 pounds of them, mostly green.

I also harvested 5 little eggplants, 3 more peppers, and the basil that was not blackened by the frost – which, judging by that frost-sensitive basil, made it into the hoop house on the last (fourth) night of the frost, after a gray day failed to warm it up enough.

I wrote some time ago about needing to do something beyond my own backyard. It didn’t take long before I figured out what that should be. Transition!

(Almost exactly a year ago I attended Transition training in Boston. You can read about it here and here.)

Taking advantage of a rare intrepid, or should I say now-or-never moment,  I called my library to reserve the Meeting Room for

1. an introductory talk about Transition Initiatives by Tina Clarke
2. a book club for reading Rob Hopkins’ Transition Handbook (three evenings)
3. three movie showings – not decided yet which ones, probably one on peak oil (or should I say peak everything?), one on our food predicament, and one on the economic situation.

I know that’s a lot of events, and it’s all just to find fellow initiators, that is, to get to the first stage of starting a Transition Initiative. Though I hope that, simply by speaking to people to get them to come to these events and advertise in their communities and newsletters, I will find some before April.

I let the date depend entirely on the availability of the Meeting Room, and so April it is (I’m lucky, some town’s Meeting Rooms are booked for over a year). And so…

April 2011 will be Wayland Transition month!

~

Meanwhile I also reconnected with the trainers and the fellow transitioners on my state’s Transition ning site, where we explore our values, share our practical efforts and look for news and support. One of my first discussions was about localization, and I shared some thoughts on “being local”:

As I am calling around my town, trying to get places to hold the Transition Wayland events in April 2011, I am confronted (in a good way) with “the locals” and especially with the question: “Am I a local?”

The I in question – that’s me – knows the answer: yes! It took me a while to get to it, but that’s a different story.

I speak with an accent. I’m from Belgium (Dutch-speaking), I moved here 13 years ago (and moved into this town, 2 years ago), and I speak English well enough, but people think I’m from Ireland (go figure).

On the phone with the library’s administrative assistant, organizing the book club for Rob’s *Handbook*, I was (kindly) asked: “Are you from here?”

Are you a local?

I said, “Now I am!”

It brought home to me the welcome principle – which Sharon in Casaubon’s Book  and several other have been espousing (cf. Adapting in Place) – that our home, our place, our locus is, simply, where we live.

So not, per se, “where we come from”. Though it is great, I hasten to add, to also have come from here (wherever you are), to have stuck around until now, to have already gotten to know your place and the people, and to be known. But we should not let the lack of such a past deter us from being “a local”. If circumstances or one’s own choice (poor or not) have only just brought us here, so be it. It’s about now, and the future.

I have let the lack of such a past (not an American, not a New Englander, not a Waylander) deter me. It made me shy, made me feel undeserving, in a sense, like I should be an observer for a while and wait for an invitation, to deserve a voice. But now I am beginning to think that it might give me an edge, this ignorance about how things are done in this town, the fact that no one knows me. This was an important realization for me, and one of the factors in getting me going again.

So you could say I’m inviting myself, or rather, have already invited myself, and so, true, I am new, but hey, I am here!