Lifescapes

Yours, most obediently--

This well-behaved beauty (Physostegia virginiana) is called Obedient plant because you can move the flowers on the stem and they will stay where they're put. Unfortunately, the plant itself isn't quite so obedient: if it likes a spot, it will spread out, make itself at home, and start cloning with enormous enthusiasm. It loves our moist, shady creek bank, among the ferns, but it is so pretty that we put up with its invasive habit. And it blooms in late summer, when almost everything else has packed up its blossoms and gone on vacation.

The creek bank is moist (a few seep springs are still running) but the creek has been dry since the end of July. We've had enough rain to keep the cows' pasture grass fairly green and healthy and the garden looking lush--but the water table is dropping fast. I'm not rooting for Gustav to come to Texas, but if he does, I wouldn't mind a good drenching here in the Hill Country.

Nightshade and datura. Datura is perhaps the loveliest nightshade, with an alluring scent, as well. Susan Tweit posted some gorgeous photos on her blog yesterday, with a fascinating description of the pollination process. Not to miss.

And for all you sock lovers, here is my latest project. That self-striping yarn is quite remarkable. I love to work with it (plus, it's machine-washable!).

Reading note:  Everybody tells me that they would love to knit, but they don't have time.  I look at people's lives and I can see opportunity and time for knitting all over the place.  The time spent riding the bus each day?  That's a pair of socks over a month.  Waiting in line?  Mittens.  Watching TV?  Buckets of wasted time that could be an exquisite lace shawl.  ~Stephanie Pearl-McPhee,

While I was gone....

While I was keeping cool in NM, this baby was growing to ripeness in TX. Came home (in the rain--yay!) on Monday night, got up at first light on Tuesday morning and headed for the garden to find this nice squash, many zukes, and the pinto beans happily clambering up their bamboo tripods. Thanks to a neighbor for watering, and to the rain goddess for raining on the garden.

The blue tubs were empty when I took this photo yesterday, but this morning, I transplated a dozen tomatoes from their soft drink bottle self-waterers (where they spent my vacation under the grow lights, growing to transplant size and then some) into the tubs and other containers. These are early-maturing tomatoes (Silver Fir and Heatwave), 55-60 days, so I hope to have ripe tomatoes by the end of October. We'll see--it's an experiment, remember? Learning from mistakes? In the foreground: carrots. In the bed in the back: southern peas (cowpeas) and green beans. More planting today.






























The vacation was lovely, but I'm ready to be home. Applebeck Orchard has gone to NY. I'm expecting the copyedited manuscript of Landscapes of the Heart next week, copyedited on the computer, which I HATE passionately but can't escape. Best just to grit my teeth and hope that there aren't too many problems. I'm back at work on Extraordinary Year, or will be when I finish planting the fall garden (maybe Friday). Bill will be back in a couple of weeks. And Hurricane Gustav will be in the Gulf on Sunday, headed who-knows-where.

Reading note. It's said that you can do everything right and still fail to harvest a worthwhile crop of watermelons. Somehow, I did everything wrong and succeeded anyway. Who is to say that making all the wrong choices doesn't lead as surely to ripeness as making all the right ones? Given time enough to ripen, we can make peace with even our worst failures and shortcomings. Given time enough to ripen, we can find that even death loses its terror.--Janice Emily Bowers: A Full Life in a Small Place

The Theory of Anyway

In a comment to my previous post, Grace mentioned "the theory of anyway." I wanted to tell you something about that and give you a couple of links, in case you haven't stumbled on it yet.

Some time back, on a couple of Internet forums on the concept of Peak Oil (the idea that the globe's hydrocarbon resources will sooner or later be depleted), Pat Meadows wrote about this idea: that whatever we need to be doing to meet the coming crises of energy depletions, we need to be doing anyway, if we are moral beings who care about others, who care about living lightly on the earth. Not long after, Sharon Astyk picked up Pat's idea and elaborated on it, in a post on her blog, Casaubon's Book. After that, Pat wrote about Sharon's post, on her own blog, in a post called "The Theory of Anyway." (If you're thinking that what goes around on the Internet certainly comes around, I couldn't agree more!)

I have long been a believer in the Theory of Anyway, and I'm grateful to Pat and Sharon for articulating it so well. I am especially grateful to Pat for this paragraph:

I think there's a terrific psychological difference determined by the frame of mind in which one takes certain actions. Supposing, for example, you are going to cover your windows with clear plastic in winter, to save on energy.

Well, you can think of yourself as being forced into this act by Peak Oil, by Global Warming, or for economic reasons. There's not much joy in taking defensive actions.

But if you can think of it as contributing to "the repair of the world," then you have a totally different view of the action. Now you can really be happy about it: you have made a difference (however small) by this action. You have conserved resources for those who desperately need them (especially if you contribute the money that you save to a charity), you have lessened your contribution to Global Warming and to air pollution and you have used less fuel. Wow! This is a good thing to have done: I can be happy about this.

Yes. There are many things we should be doing anyway. Things that we can be happy about. Things that our governments (national, state, and local) can never do for us.

Thank you, Pat, for naming The Theory of Anyway. Thank you, Sharon, for elaborating on it. And thank you, Grace, for reminding us here on this blog.

I'm leaving New Mexico and heading back to Texas on Monday, August 25. I'd love to stay where it's cool, but my fall kitchen garden project needs tending to. I've left some tomato, broccali, and cabbage seedlings under grow lights, with a home-made self-watering arrangement. I'm curious to see how this has worked out. I'm not counting on this garden to feed us this fall, although I'm sure we'll enjoy whatever it produces. It's an experimental plot, where I'm growing some heirloom varieties that I hope will do well in our Texas climate. I'll have more details about it later.

Reading note. When we comprehend our actions over time, we see what we do in terms of a story. We see obstacles confronted, and intentions realized and frustrated over time. As we move forward from yesterday to today to tomorrow, we move through tensions building to climaxes, climaxes giving way to denouements, and tensions building again as we continue to move and change. Human time is a storied affair.--Donald P. McAdams

Busy New Mexico Bee

Don't know if you can see in the photo (click on it for a better view), but this bee's pollen baskets are loaded. She's been visiting the sunflowers along the road in front of our house. And not just sunflowers. Yellow clover, red clover, goldenrod, mullein, primroses, thistles, purple asters. Enough to keep a bee busy for the rest of the season. That's short here: nights have been in the 40s this week. And rain almost every day, which is definitely okay by me, since I'm having an indoor vacation, writing, reading, thinking, knitting, watching the mountains. Oh, and admiring the bees.

We drove to Las Vegas yesterday, to the farmers' market, maybe 25 vendors and lots of buyers. Plenty of local garden veggies, greens, melons, herbs, even flowers and plants. I bought corn, radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, and we feasted on tostadas last night. Next project: learning to make tortillas. I'm okay with flour tortillas, but corn tortillas are still a mystery. I tried last night but flopped. Good thing I had some store-bought tostada shells tucked in the pantry.

Writing and reading. I'll send an efile of Applebeck Orchard to New York tomorrow (it's finished), and follow up with a print copy when I get home. I need to get Peggy Turchette started on the map--she's done the covers from the second book on, and I hope will be doing the cover for this book, too (not my call: the Art folks at Berkley make that decision). I'm working on An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days. In case you've just tuned in, this is my "journal book," which (I hope) will be published by the University of Texas Press in 2010. I've been making regular entries throughout the year, and I've now reviewing what I've done so far, pruning and shaping the journal into a book. That's my project for the rest of the year--that, and the next China Bayles, which I need to start in November/December. Holly Blues, it's called.

Rereading the entries in Extraordinary Year, I'm struck by the way my ideas and attitudes about the future have changed since February, when I began reading and educating myself about "peak oil" and other resource depletions. Bill is deeply interested in this, too, and we've been having some lengthy discussions about how we--the two of us, that is--might be affected and what changes we ought to make in our lives.

Much of this is reflected in Extraordinary Year, which makes it a coming-to-realize book in a way that I could not have foreseen when I pitched the idea to my editor in September, 2007. It's a different book altogether from the one I envisioned a year ago, and much riskier (personally speaking), since it lets readers into a corner of my life that I wouldn't ordinarily open to them. But that's what happens when you propose a journal book that will cover a particular year: you simply cannot predict what's going to happen. Donald Hall started a journal book one year (Life Work), and was diagnosed with cancer in mid-year. So you work with the material that life hands you. Life has handed me these new ideas, and that's what I'm working with.

And more reading. I've finished High Noon for Natural Gas and can recommend it, although I admit to skipping the highly technical parts (I'm not a petroleum geologist) and focusing on the Big Picture. (Bill is more interested in the technical aspects, and fills in details that I miss.) I don't know if I'm Nietzsche's "perfect reader," but I'm really compelled by this stuff, which seems so urgent to me, and it's been especially good to talk these books over with Bill. Together, we read James Kunstler's A World Made by Hand (which I discovered through a review in Orion Magazine). That book led both of us to The Long Emergency, also by Kunstler.

Yesterday when we went to Las Vegas, I took my Kindle (I'm in love with it) and downloaded Matthew Simmons' Twilight in the Desert: the Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, and J.A. Jance's Devil's Claw, for fun reading. We're out of cell phone range up here, and Kindle delivers via cell-phone techology.

There are some periods in my life that have been marked by the opening of radically new ideas, some of them life-changing. My first couple of years at college, the first year at graduate school in Berkley (1968), and now this. These ideas, every time, have come from books. I feel a little like that bee, hurrying from one source to another, collecting all kinds of materials, bringing them back into myself, and being changed (sometimes uncomfortably) by them.

Reading note. When I picture a perfect reader, I always picture a monster of courage and curiosity, also something supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventure and discoverer.-- Nietzsche

View from my window

This is what I see when I look out the window of my writing loft. Green native grasses, a pine-covered ridge to the south, and five miles beyond (not visible from here), Hermit's Peak, where in the 1870s a real hermit, Giovanni Augustiani, lived for several years in a rock shelter. This is the summer monsoon season, and Bill (who is repairing and refinishing the logs of our house) is endlessly frustrated by the rains. I'm sorry for his frustration, but I love the rain, and the delightfully varied weathers: bright, clear mornings; billowing thunderheads and curtains of rain falling across the mountains in the afternoon; brilliant sunsets; starry, starry nights.

Yesterday, we visited a neighbor's garden. Marge and Dick are growing carrots, beets, beans, lettuces, potatoes, tomatoes, strawberries, corn, and peas in a deer-proof enclosure. (We brought home a bag of fresh peas. I shelled them and we had them for supper--delicious.) The growing season here is short: last frost the second week of June, first frost the middle of September. Last year, Marge brought in her green tomatoes and ripened them in the basement. On Saturday, we went to a farmer's market in Las Vegas: watermelons, cantalopes, squash, peas, and bushels of fresh corn. The Mora Valley, just to the north of us, has long been known for its truck gardening. We're planning a few more day trips, after the book is finished. Not sure how long I'll be here--maybe a couple more weeks.

Book report. The book will be finished today, maybe, or tomorrow. It's actually done--that is, it's all written. This is my last pass through it, cleaning up problems, smoothing the style, reweaving a few plot strands. The work has gone pretty fast, and I'm pleased. I gave a book talk on Saturday night at Tome on the Range, to a full house. It's not every town (Las Vegas is only about 15,000) that has an independent bookstore, thanks to the commitment and courage of Nancy (the owner) and Janet (the manager). Life isn't easy for non-chain bookstores these days, and these gals deserve a huge round of applause.

Otherwise, reading (currently High Noon for Natural Gas: The New Energy Crisis--part of my effort to educate myself to the various resource depletions we are facing); knitting a sock; watching DVDs in the evening (last night, the old but still good Conduct Unbecoming). We're slowly getting used to life without Labs, and Toro is settling into his new status as Only Dog. We had a birthday party for neighbor Bob Goodfellow (his 73rd!), but Toro stole the show from Bob. He was the center of attention and loved it.

Reading note, from Little Things in a Big Country, one of the books for the online class I'm teaching for Story Circle this fall: And what do we really know of all this--the substance of light, the inner lives of creatures, the forming and dissolving of clouds and mountains, the countless events playing out simultaneously, ceaselessly? I find it soothing to be rendered insignificant. And am cheered just to be at home on the planet, upright and walking around, in the midst of the vast unknowable.--Hannah Hinchman

Here

There's always a certain dis-location, coming to New Mexico. We've owned this house--Coyote Lodge is the name we've given it--for nearly four years, but we've been spending time here for six or seven. "Here" is the small mountain community of Pendaries, between Taos and Las Vegas, on the eastern slope of the southern Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The valley to the north of our house is a cattle ranch. Beyond (more photos later), the mountains, often tinged red by the rising sun.

It was hot in Texas when I left (104 is HOT) but deliciously cool here. In Texas, the view is trees--pecan, willow, oak, hackberry, elm--and rolling hills; here, pine trees and mountains. The window in the gable is my loft writing studio. The pines are lodgepole and Ponderosa. In bloom along our road: sunflowers, mullein, asters, verbena, purple clover, yellow clover. I left a hurricane behind, Eduordo, which turned out to be only a tropical storm and didn't do much to ease the drought at Meadow Knoll. And Toro and I left Zach behind, another difficult dislocation, but one that will be steadied by time.

Book report. After a couple of days getting settled (remembering where I'd left things, stocking the fridge, doing laundry, saying hello to neighbors), I'm back at work on Applebeck Orchard. It's finished, but not quite--it needs one more run-through before I can call it quits. I'm anxious to get on to my other writing project for this year: a journal book called An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days. I've been working on it since January, and since the year is nearly three-quarters done, so is that project. But it needs trimming and smoothing, and I'm adding reading notes, thanks to my editor's agreement that the book will have "scholar's margins," wide margins with space for quotations, like the ones at the bottom of these blog entries. Today: Applebeck. This evening, watching a DVD with Bill, knitting (socks, naturally) and reading (currently: Kitchen Literacy, by Ann Vileisis, for review at www.StoryCircleBookReviews).

And there's another writing project in the works, for the wonderful new online ezine on sustainability, www.henandharvest.com, where I'll be writing about herbs and other such. Check it out.

Reading note, from Kitchen Literacy: As I pushed my shopping cart through the supermarket aisles, questions rose insistently in my mind: How were my eggs raised? Who grew my tomatoes? Where did my fish come from? What about the milk? The colorful boxes, cans, and jars that had long appeared familiar and comforting now looked cryptic. Each product, I realized, was the culmination of some hidden story that I--and most of my fellow shoppers--had never bothered to consider. Everything we ate had a story, but we didn't know any of them.--Ann Vileisis

Sister Earth

Going on. Many thanks to all of you for your comments and emails. Bill and I appreciate it more than we can tell you. Our animal companions fill such an important place in our lives--it's good to know that so many of us have shared that kind of love, and that we can go on when our friends have left us.

So we are going on here. This morning, Toro (our heeler) and I were heartened by the sight of huge swarms of bees--many natives, but some honeybees--on the sumacs, which have just come into bloom along our morning path. After a long bee-drought, this feels like a blessing, a message from Sister Earth that the daily round of life and death, blossom, bee, and fruit--it all goes on, even though losses leave us lonely.

I'm leaving a little earlier than I had planned to join Bill in New Mexico. With luck, that will be tomorrow. Lots happening here today. For one thing, Peggy and I have just launched Story Circle's online class program--a project that's been taking up my spare time for some months. You can check us out here. For another, I'm packing and collecting stuff for the trip, including a box of to-be-read books I've been saving. And Peggy and I are putting together the herbal eletters that will go out while I'm gone. So today's busy. And hot. Yesterday, our digital thermometer told me it was 104.6, in the shade. It may be a couple of degrees high, but who's counting when the temps go over 100?

Book report. Yes, I'm finished with Applebeck Orchard. Well, more or less. One more pass through (probably about 5-6 days work), and then print and mail.

I'll be doing one book talk while I'm in New Mexico, on August 9. Las Vegas (NM) is an interesting old town, with lots of history. If you're in the area and looking for a Saturday field trip, it's a good place to go--and of course, you're invited to join me that evening, at Tome on the Range.

I'll try to blog while I'm gone, but we're on dialup in the mountains, and the line is verrrry verrrrrrry slow. I'll try to keep you posted.

Reading note. This earth is my sister; I love her daily grace, her silent daring, and how loved I am. How we admire this strength in each other, all that we have lost, all that we have suffered, all that we know: we are stunned by this beauty, and I do not forget: what she is to me, what I am to her.--Susan Griffin