MamaStories

To many of you it might seem like not much, but to DH and me it looks like the foundation of paradise!

Some trees (in the background: 1 large white oak, 1 smaller birch and 1 smaller maple) had to be felled to make way for the new septic system. Their remains have been lying around for a while now. A couple of times DH and I stood in front of the ax, maul and chainsaw displays at the local Home Depot… speechless. Neither of us have any experience with firewood. I’ve thrown a log into an open fireplace maybe once in my life. So we were intimidated.

Luckily our neighbor turns out to be a firewood seller and a really nice guy. He came to our rescue with his chainsaw and also showed DH how to use the splitting maul.

Amie was quite impressed. She loved to help, carrying the logs to the pile, “like a big girl!” (sorry, I didn’t catch it on camera). She knows the difference now between “tree” and “wood” (*).

Installing a good wood stove into or near our fireplace is one of the priorities. The downed trees will make for at least two cords of firewood, which might be cured sufficiently by the end of October. There are some stacks of old firewood rotting around the property, and we might be able to save some of that too. I’m thinking we’ll need three cords…

Oh, life is good and nature provides!

(*) one of those fundamental Aristotelian distinction, so easily and naturally applicable to the world, as Aristotle always is!

News alert.

This is in from the Childbirth Connection:

Relentless Rise in Cesarean Section Rate
The National Center for Heath Statistics has just released the preliminary U.S. national cesarean rate for 2006: 31.1%. This rate has increased by 50% in the past decade, reaching a record level every year in this century. The most common operating room procedure in U.S. hospitals, cesarean section involves considerable morbidity in women and babies and expense for private payers/employers and Medicaid/taxpayers.

They have a .pdf of a Mothering Magazine article called “Cesarean Birth in a Culture of Fear” on their website. And lots of other information. They’re definitely worth a visit.

I can’t remember or find out via which blog I discovered this (my apologies), but it is fantastic and I want to spread the word. It is “The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard,”  an informative, entertaining and especially rousing little movie (20 minutes long) about, you know, stuff. Go have a look-see!

I’ll just reproduce an old cartoon I penned years ago, when our condo - 25 units - didn’t have recycling (yet) and DH and I volunteered to make weekly trips in our Geo Prizm hauling everyone’s recycling away. That may explain DH’s reluctance in the comic…

In other news: I caught Amie’s cold and though she is on the upswing, I am succumbing to the sneezy snottering coughies and the ringing-of-the-ears, o the ringing!

Still, I am cheered when I think of my little two-year-old’s statement yesterday afternoon, after L, the babysitter, came that morning:

“When Baba comes home, and when L comes home, we’ll all have dinner!”

Thanks to Moonmeadow Farm, this is Wendell Berry’s poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from his book The Country of Marriage (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). I hope it’s ok to reproduce it here… 

Oh but be fearless!

 So:

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry (my hero)

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

                 ~

There is so much in this poem, I won’t even try to write about it, as yet. I’ve only just discovered it, let me read a couple of hundred times first, soak it up… rest my head in its lap.

Ok, very very depressing post here… I repeat: very…

Who hasn’t seen that old tv-movie, The Day After? I watched it, on Belgian television, when I was about twelve or thirteen years old. I don’t think my parents knew what it was about, and they probably weren’t paying much attention as it unfolded, because otherwise they would have yanked me away immediately. I still remember the many weeks of depression, anxiety and nightmares that followed it.

Clicking through the channels last week I stumbled upon a rerun. DH warned me: should you watch this? But of course I am not a kid anymore - whatever that means. He became annoyed at it because it is such a bad movie, but I was (again) glued to the television.

What captured me 20 year ago captured me now: the slow decline of individuals (physical, emotional, spiritual), of society and civilization in the aftermath of nuclear war. It’s a long movie, so there’s lots of time for declining. The grind of it, the slow seeping away of hope is just excruciating. And you know that that’s how it would be. Worse, even.

This time, what stood out was the scene in which farmers congregate wtih an official to be briefed on how to replant the crops. The idea is that they scrape away the top layer of the topsoil that is contaminated with fall-out. The farmers nearly rebel. There is no more gas for vehicles  - there’s a neat shot of a number plate being trod underfoot - and only some horses and carts. And what to do with the dead soil? And what is safe? And what to grow?

Someone has posted the entire movie in segments on YouTube (thanks a lot: now I can revisit my obsession endlessly!), and you can view the scene here, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Then I read Sharon’s post, about a study that shows that the only way to avoid the critical 2 degree temperature rise is to reduce all industrial emissions worldwide by 100%. This post also contains a link to an earlier post of Sharon’s about what her children’s future will look like. She writes that writing this piece made her cry. So did reading it, for me.

And to top it all off, I read in the news that there was an accidental firing of a Patriot missiles in Iraq. Nice going!

Do you ever have that feeling that you’re just pretending? Pretending that it will all be ok? That it won’t be so bad? You look at your child and you just can’t believe that she won’t have what we have - I’m not talking about Lego and bananas, but about water and food, health and safety.

You feel like you want to shield her from this knowledge - even if you can’t shield her from the future - and you want to let her be happy and carefree for as long as possible. But you also feel like you want to prepare her. And some days, well, the future looks so bleak that no kind of preparation seems adequate…

How do you deal with this kind of hopelessness? I know, I know: you stop watching The Day After! And you tell yourself to stop it, because this kind of thinking won’t do anyone any good. But beyond all those negatives?

We were all set for a relaxed weekend, when at 10 in the morning our place was suddenly bombarded by a deafening noise: our upstairs neighbor was having her floors sanded - without warning to us. Well… It was still going on when time Amie’s naptime came around, so we had to flee, and after trying to get her to nap in the stroller - that’s not going to happen anymore! - we got in the car and drove to Walden Pond.

We spent two wonderful hours there. Amie loved it, picking up stones and sand and throwing them into the water, and before I knew it, getting in up to her ankles, shoes and socks and sleeves and all! 

I stripped us of socks and shoes, rolled up the trouser legs, and we made sand clouds by wiggling our toes, stomping our feet. Threw rocks of course, and stuck twigs into the loose sand. Admired little stone houses built by previous visitors to the small beach. We admired the sunshine on the waves, got dizzy looking at them - Amie kept saying: “I’m going! I’m going now!” - and once or twice nearly fell in.  And made waves.

The weather was  glorious and the water warm from an entire summer. There were maybe thirty other visitors - a stark contrast to our last visit over a year ago, when we had to fight to find some towel space on the beach.

I picked up Amie and carried her on my hip almost halfway around the pond, telling her about Thoreau - we didn’t make it to the site of his cabin.  She may have understood something of it. It doesn’t matter. She came home and told her Baba: “I went to Walrus Pond!”

I felt pretty bad about the car drive. The question of whether a nap was worth it became useless as soon as it was clear that Amie wouldn’t even go to sleep in the car (she didn’t: she was a wild child by the time we got home!). Next time we’re taking more people along, and/or we’re getting there by alternative means.

• Complacency 

I probably shouldn’t have watched “Dimming the Sun” on NOVA/PBS yesterday. Did you see it?  I stumbled upon the last half hour of the program by accident and by the time it was over, all the old feelings of hopelessness, helplessness and inadequacy made their comeback. And of course, whenever they do that, they are worse than before, because I was yet again lulled into a false sense of security, yet again complacent.

When I went to bed, there was my Amie, sleeping so soundly and sweetly, with not a care in the world. I lay down next to her and wept, whispering empty”sorries”. I couldn’t bring myself to saying: “I’ll make it all better.”

• Dimming the Sun

So what was the program about?

It turns out that, since the seventies and eighties, when air polution in Europe and Northern America went virtually unchecked, said air polution  has been “dimming” the sun, that is, reflecting the sunlight back, in effect cooling the earth . Another contributor to this are contrails: the vapor trails left behind by high-flying aircraft.

This has veiled the actual degree of global warming, which, if we take the dimming into account, now seems much more advanced than we thought. Since the 1990s, Europe and Northern America have been cutting down on polution, which sounds like a good thing, for health reasons, obviously, but it is a double-edged sword: it opens the door to more global warming. And, as James Hansen put it:

In a way, it is unfortunate that the small particles were in the atmosphere because we would have realized much earlier that the…how strong the greenhouse effect is, and would have had more time to make the adjustments that are going to be necessary to slow down and eventually stop the growth of greenhouse gases.

• Ethiopia, 1984

The most gripping example of this dimming for me was the footage of the great draught and famine in the Sahel: Ethiopia, 1984.

For decades, the seasonal monsoons, which had kept the Sahel going - hanging on by its fingernails - stayed away. No one know why, but it now seems that it was due to that same polution by Europe and Northern America - which satellite pictures revealed reached deeply into the Sahel. These particles blocked the sun’s yearly warm-up of the oceans north of the equator. This in turn blocked the ocean from drawing the tropical rainbelt around the equator up north for a while. That meant that the land at that longitude was no longer getting its much needed monsoon.

The images of all those starving and dead children… They gripped us in the 80’s, and we all contributed to Aid. But I wonder: had we known, had it been pointed out to us, that it was we who were directly repsonsible for this, would we have changed our lifestyles?

• The End of the Trees and the Soil

The Sahel was an example of the consequences of dimming the sun in the past. The program of course also looked into the future. Today’s climate models predict a maximum warming of 5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, but this young climate scientist, Peter Cox, thinks it could very well rise by as much as 10 degrees Celsius, or 18 degrees Fahrenheit.

Within a matter of years, many plants would die. Also the trees. The soil would simply blow away… Just writing this down makes my head feel top-heavy! If you missed the show, see if they will rerun it in your region, or read the transcript: even without the images, it brings the message home.

• Children

The program ended with children - because they’re the future, you know. The climatologist, Peter Cox, was shown playing on a beach with his young son. But it wasn’t sentimental tear-jerking. When Cox took the last word, it sounded like an understatement (and this from the most pessimistic of global-warming scientists, and the father of a child who will live to see his predications come true):

One of the real driving forces is that you leave an environment that is comfortable for your children. And if we carry on going the way we’re going, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to leave an environment that’s much worse than the environment we lived in, and it will be down to what we did when we were using that environment, and that would be, tragic, really, if that happened.

It already is tragic, in my eyes. As you know, I am one of the pessimists about what will change - Hansen says we have a decade before we reach the point of no return.

That’s why I say “sorry” to Amie, but not “I’ll make it all better”. I’ll do my best, and every little bit counts, makes it a little bit better, I know, but in the end, I often despair whether it will be enough.

I don’t want to promise what I can’t deliver.

I got weed juice seemingly permanently rubbed into my fingers, dirt under my fingernails, my first case of “hoe-neck,” scratches all over my arm from the squash plants, a little back ache, a mild sunburn… When I proudly mentioned this litany to my friend, she said:

- “Honey! You’re a gardener now.”

I raised my hand to stop her and said, as seriously as I’ve ever said anything in my life:

- “Correction: I’m a farmer now.”

Then we laughed, of course.

I’m not a farmer yet, by a long shot (or even a gardener), but I have made a beginning. Volunteering at a farm - offering physical labor for experience - was a longstanding plan of mine, and after some paperwork and a couple of interviews, it finally came together. I am now an agricultural volunteer at Drumlin Farm in lovely Lincoln, Massachusetts! In fact, I have been so for over a month, though I’ve only been able to spend about 15 hours.

• Nothing but hands and hard work

On the forms and during the interviews, I was repeatedly asked what I could contribute to the farm. I was always honest: nothing but the strength of my body. I made it clear that I have no special skills, no experience, no expertise, and very little book knowledge. 

But, I said, I have these great tools: my hands. And enthusiasm, curiosity and no problem with hard physical labor.

That was, apparently, sufficient. And it was great, showing up on the first day and having nothing expected of me other than hard work.

• My farming so far

I saved the cosmos (flower), from the purslane (and lamented the fate of said purslane, as it is chock-full of omega-3s and we just threw it on the compost pile) , I weeded and hoed the carrot, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, broccoli and squash fields. I also trellissed tomatoes. The work is simple, hard, hot and repetitive, and I don’t mind it at all.

• Lonely work

It’s also lonely, as I come at times when most workers have left for the farmstand at the Farmer’s Market. One of the apprentices apologized for leaving me alone in the fields, with no one to talk to, and another suggested I come on Sundays, when the members of their CSA come in and there are more people and opportunities to chat.

But I like the loneliness of it, the intense concentration on the plants, and once in a while standing up and being surprised by how suddenly the sky changed.

• Learning

To be honest I haven’t learned much by way of “farm facts”, not much of the whys and wherefors of decisions and actions. I just do what the crop’s manager asks. I should be more assertive in asking questions, which the apprentices and crop’s manager  would gladly answer. I’ll slowly start doing that, as more opportunities arise. For now, I’m just there, in the moment.

I have gained experience, most importantly of my feeling of responsibility for the crops. I get to take some at the end of the day, so the carrot I save from the weed may be mine to take home in a week or two. But I am also repsonsible in a more general way. That is what I am there to do: to relearn the skills of growing food, which I have come to think of as a responsibility we all have.

I’m taking it easy. I want to feel at home on the farm first, before I start learning for serious.

I had a discussion today with my upstairs neighbor this morning. She leaves her airconditioners on, all of them, all day and night, even while she’s at work. One of them is very noisy and makes the doorknobs in our bedroom vibrate. I met her in the hallway and addressed the problem (again). She was very defensive, which is not new, but in a (for her) novel way. She said:

- “I can run my airconditioners whenever I want!”

I said she could, it’s her electricity bill, and was going to reiterate my real complaint (about the noise), when suddenly I realized that, no, this time I won’t shut up! So I added:

- “Still, don’t you feel bad about wasting fossil fuels and polluting the environment? What about your grandson? I am always thinking of Amie’s future. I am sure you think of his future too. I know you’re very fond of him.”

This rambling and pacifying tone is typical me: I can’t bear confrontation, and my neighbor can be very rude and aggressive (verbally), so I was extra careful.

- “Those will be their problems, not mine,” she stated, stomped off, and slammed her door. 

Then followed the brilliant insight, the stroke of argumentative and rhetorical genius, the absolutely withering reparte:

- ”How about this: in 50 years time, when water and food and fuel are rationed, your grand and great-grandchildren are allocated less than others, because their grandmother was so wasteful.”

She answers:

- “It would be totally unfair to punish my grandchildren because of my behavior!”

Me:

- “Oh really?!”

(Again she stomps off, but after her slamming her door, she thinks about this, and within 10 minutes I can hear she has turned off her airconditioners. Then she calls me up to suggest the condo step up the recycling and install a compost bin…)

Two conversations.

• The Future: Star Trek or Middle Ages?

We were noting all those people cueing up in front of the stores to get their hands on an iPhone.

- “Idiotic,” I judged, “an irrelevant piece of junk”.

- “Sacrilege!” DH countered - he’s not wanting to get an iPhone, he was just defending what it stands for.

Personally, I have been letting go, slowly at first, now faster and faster, of the idea of the future that most of us grew up with: that sci-fi sleek, sanitized, technologically facilitated world.

Now I am envisioning something more primitive and - in my eyes - wholesome: something a darker green, where growing food is the priority. No replicators a la Star Trek, but hands digging in the dirt, pulling out a carrot. No communicators, but a friendly chat with the neighbors. No transporting out to another continent, but a walk around the commons.

It all sounds very “medieval” to my husband, who is a real technology devotee and will not let go of that old dream. I don’t mind the word “medieval”: as a historian with an interest in those times, I have a more realistic - i.e., less dark - idea of the Middle Ages.

- “Well,” I concluded, “it is going to play itself out, one way or the other, in our lifetimes. We’ll revisit this talk in a couple of decades and see who was right.”

- “Okay,” he joked, “record it in that medieval contraption of yours, “your journal.”

What will we be consulting, in let’s say 30 or 40 years? The moleskine, or this blog?

• Potboiler or highbrow?

Later in the evening I was reporting my progress on The Potboiler (working title of my adventure novel). Deep into my narration of medieval manuscripts, Greek myths, aniconic Bronze Age worship of the Mother Goddess, the metaphysics of time (*)… DH interrupted me:

- “That doesn’t sound like the Da Vinci Code!”

- “I found I just can’t write something like that. I think it will be more like The Name of the Rose,” I stated.

- “But I want those millions!” DH exclaimed.

- “The Name of the Rose made millions,” I could reassure him. “And they made a movie of it too. Don’t worry, we’ll still get by.”

(*) I hope that’s not a spoiler!