What is my seed starting mix?

 

Living in a small Midwestern city like I do, I'm grateful that our community has a locally owned greenhouse and nursery. I don't just try to support it, I pilgrimage there as soon as they open their doors (usually late January-early February) for the season. I breathe in the smells of dirt and liquid fertilizer, which in late winter in Iowa is basically the smell of Hope with a capital H, for those of us that struggle with dark winter days. 

I am a particular fan of their seed starting mix, a special blend that is light, fluffy, moist, and just right for germinating all the things I like to grow in my garden-- annual flowers like zinnia, marigold, calendula, sunflowers, and amaranth; and vegetables like tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and cucumbers.

This year I wasn't as successful starting seed as I usually am, though I'm not blaming my local nursery's bags of soil-- they are only one factor in the complex and tiny miracle of unfolding new plant life. So many things I did wrong this year-- I tried to use up older packages of seed that wouldn't germinate; I started some seeds too late, and others too early. I tried to grow some seeds that I have yet to conquer successfully (Bells of Ireland, Nigella) when I was too distracted by work stress; I failed to grow some stupidly easy plants because of the same distractions; I discovered too far into the game that my lighting timer wasn't working properly, denying them the light my veggies and flowers needed to truly thrive. 

It's weird to be writing about seed starting right now, as we are well past the seed starting stage, well past spring and into high summer. But this year has been weird. We've had March days in the 90s (Fahrenheit) and June frosts. The plants and I have had multiple trips out to the patio, back into the screen porch. We've had weeks of nothing but rain, but are now verging on drought in Iowa. Up and down. Back and forth. Forward and backward. Start and stop and give up for this week, try again next week. Even now, that hot weather seems here to stay for awhile, the garden is upside down. The chrysanthemums are too early. The cucumbers, running late. 

It's been that way emerging from the pandemic, as well. Vaccines have been very much progress. My strong reaction to them (hives) was not. I have been eager to get out, see people, do things. I often come home from these first-in-a-long-time activities a sweet and sour pickle of attitude-- delighted to be out of the house, full of vinegar about the how exhausting humans (including myself) can be sometimes. I thought I had missed them. I return from their company not so sure.

So I put the mask back on and flew to Georgia to see my sister. We hiked the Appalachian Trail to Preacher's Rock on Big Cedar Mountain. It was beautiful but I was out of shape and clumsy, skinning my knee falling on the steeper switchbacks. It was embarrassing and yet how could it be any other way, after more than a year of eating and drinking my feelings, and trying to get a grip on a new managerial position from the sofa? 

We ate lunch out and had midday margaritas. We went for walks. We shopped for anything and nothing. We talked. We talked a lot. The topics weren't necessarily important-- we talked about kitchen cupboards and plants and running shoes and dogs. But the talking is the medicine. It is a way to be with our ancestors. It is a way to straighten our girl crowns. It is a part of my seed-starting mix. 

Since coming back from that trip I've been able to distinguish a few maddeningly conflicting truths about seed-starting. I know that the same seeds that failed to grow carefully planted in the shelter of my house in March are springing up in random places in June from seeds that were accidentally strewn last fall while cleaning up the garden. While my carrot seeds were too old this year, I know scientists have resurrected a date palm seed from Biblical times, and I myself have grown hollyhock seeds that were at least a decade old. While March is long gone and it is too late to start peas and spinach, there is still time for planting sunflower seeds and another crop of basil or dill. We are always simultaneously out of time, just in time, too early, too late. We grow amazing things with planning and care and also by marvelous accident and benign neglect. It's how the beautiful weeds wind their way through through our carefully planted rows, both pushing stem and leaf upwards toward the sunlight. 

Things I have been doing: 

Binge-watching Home Town. I fell back in love with the fantasy of reviving an old house in an hour. 

Making whoopie pies. They are good straight from the fridge with a glass of milk. 

Planning to carve out a small craft room in our basement. Lighting and waterproofing come first!

Cleaning the bathroom supply closet. 

I am not an empath, and other ways I am (not) coping

Over my lifetime, I've flogged myself and prided myself over my hyper-sensitivity, in equal measure. I hate that it often makes me the odd one out. Hate that it at times has makes me literally physically ill. Hate that it necessitates a list of coping strategies that don't even occur to many. Hate that whatever is neurologically different about me, I can't seem to put it down or choose my way out of it. 

Still, I admit taking a kind of grim satisfaction in being a so-called empath, able to intuit the emotional states and intents of other people, often so correctly it seems like clairvoyance. I may not always like what my emotional antennae are reporting back to my highly anxious cerebral cortex, but it's a kind of darkly beneficial superpower, isn't it? Isn't it?

On Inauguration Day, I was watching the 46th President of the United States take his oath of office. I had live coverage streaming from my personal laptop most of the day, while I sat at my work laptop and attempted to act as though it was a normal day. It wasn't. It already wasn't, like so much of the past year wasn't, like so much of the past four years weren't. I was working from home, on the sofa, with a quilt in my lap, pandemic style. Guarded from harm. 

The Inaugural proceedings were not normal either. The president and vice president took their oaths of office in a capitol on high alert, full of national guards, before a nearly empty venue, with masks and distancing. Guarded from harm. 

On that day, I was a peculiar combination of lighthearted and wildly anxious. I let myself enjoy the assembly of past and present presidents and first ladies. I took in the perfection that was Amanda Gorman's poetry, hair, and vivid gold suit.  I, too, laughed at Bernie's mittens. I noted the symbolism of all that purple (red + blue = purple). I counted how many times Joe said "unity." I considered that this sunny hopeful moment came the day after a memorial service to 400,000+ dead of a pandemic our country has failed to contain. I stood watch for violence that (thankfully) never came. It was a stew of outward hope and relief and inward fear and grief that boiled up into the emotional equivalent of carsickness after a long trip-- I'm glad we're finally here after that long awful ride, but now I need to go throw up. 

I didn't actually "throw up," until the next day. I was again at my work laptop, at the kitchen table, drinking my morning coffee and reading my e-mail, which included some information about the policies and plans of the new Biden-Harris administration. Policies and plans that were common sense. Practical. Inclusive. Humane. Optimistic. Responsible. I don't really remember starting to cry. Just that there were big fat blobby teardrops falling on my forearms, the table, the keyboard. Breath went out of me like stale air exits a house from an opening door. I could feel the muscles that run up my back, neck, and shoulders sag downward, suddenly all out of tension.

Somewhere between the day of fat blobby tears and last weekend, this meme popped up in one of my feeds-- "Babe you're not an empath, you have PTSD from an unstable household, and are sensitive to emotional changes as a defense mechanism." Ouch. 

I grew up where the expectations were that I would be good. Really good and clean and tidy and polite. And quiet. And not cause trouble. Or talk back. Talk, even. In many ways, the relative peace of the household depended on my ability to disappear-- verbally, physically, emotionally. What did that train me for? Withdrawing. I am a special forces-in-camouflage level withdrawer, able to sense impending danger, gather my feelings up tight around me, sink below the radar of community, colleagues, friends, and family, out of their depth and unavailable, sometimes even to myself, for long stretches at a time. Guarded from harm. 

Until I bumped into that meme, I thought I had addressed that part of myself with some reasonable self-awareness, that I'd made a conscious decision to shed that part of my behavior, like it was an ill-fitting jacket instead of a layer of dragon scales that I had grown. I was wrong. How do you flay that off of yourself when it's the only armor you've ever known? Who is brave enough to stand all tender and bare, when the enemy is all around? I wasn't. I can see all the ways, now, that I simply returned to the well-worn grooves of my own history, for the last four years of this authoritarian insanity, the last year of this global pandemic. 

I have no doubt that plenty of others have traveled their well-worn grooves to get them through this time of outrage and untruths and disease. The thing about survival tactics is that they work, at some level, even if they aren't psychologically healthy ones. If survival is the goal, and it was for many, many people during these last four years, then a measure of grace is needed, both for those whose response was fight, and for those whose response was flight. 

While I'm trying to decide what that measure of grace might be, how to bestow it upon myself and others, I am hopeful that the coming days and months will give us the air and light and space we need to figure it all out, and find other ways of living besides just surviving. 

Things I'm doing right now: 

Painting interior house trim, and hating every minute of it. 

Reading a cookbook: Plenty, by Yotam Ottolenghi

Losing sleep over the anxiety-inducing ideas presented in this New York Times article: "How Nothingness Became Everything We Wanted."

Adding salted caramel-flavor Bailey's Irish Cream to vanilla buttercream frosting. This isn't sponsored. This isn't a recipe (add a few tablespoons to a batch for part of the liquids). It's just solid advice for cake eaters. Go do it. 

Flattened

Iowans felt the way the corn looked. Image Iowa State University Extension and Outreach. 

On August 10, a straight line storm howled through Iowa, the state where I live. Meteorologists called it a derecho, a word for a widespread and long-lived straight-line storm. I had never heard the word before, even as a life-long Midwesterner who's seen her fair share of scary storms; but Wikipedia assures me that the term has been in use since the late 19th century. 

In 2020, it meant winds equivalent to a category 4 hurricane with no time to prepare. I had been walking around the neighborhood in the morning before the storm hit; thunderstorms had been predicted for that afternoon and I wanted to get my walk in before the weather turned. When I got back I'd also paced around our yard, checking the tomato plants, puttering, and trying to delay the start of my work day.

There is a moment before a bad storm when birds and insects stop. Stop moving, stop singing, stop whirring. If you are paying attention, it is one of the most ominous silences in Creation. It made me lift my face to the western sky, where there was a bank of fast-moving darkness heading our way. I went inside, and half an hour later, the storm hit my town. 

In Iowa there is a standard line of dark humor about the country rube who is too dumb to be scared, who watches tornadoes and hailstorms from his front porch, when all common sense and storm sirens and meteorologists are telling us we should be in our basements. But the plain truth is that we are all that dumb rube. I think Iowans feel that we need to "keep an eye on it." As though we could prevent it just by keeping watch. As though it is somehow likely to be worse when we can't see it, if we're hidden in a dark cellar corner between the boxes of Christmas decorations and the shelf of surplus canned goods. It's a perverse kind of courage. Tom and I played the part, watching from the front living room window, while transformers blew, trees cracked apart, and our street ran in full flood. As soon as the storm was done in the central part of the state, it gathered strength and blew full force into the eastern part of the state, finally petering out somewhere in Illinois.

The result was an estimated quarter of a million households without power in a state with approximately three million residents, and 10 million acres of destroyed crops, mostly corn and soybeans, but others as well. Split and crumpled grain bins. Thousands of downed or damaged trees. Wrecked homes. 

Weeks later, communities in Iowa are still digging out. It would be more than enough in a good year. And by good year, I mean any year not this one. But here we are. Iowans are looking at a physical manifestation of all that's happening to our nation, as well as, you know, what's happening to our nation. That's some shit, people. It flattened us like it flattened the corn stalks. 

Also weeks later, we have other layers piled on the flat surface of our physical destruction. News that Iowa's numbers in the pandemic have reached new and alarming heights. News that multiple school districts are in a legal fight with the governor's office over the right to protect their students and teachers from the risks of the pandemic. News that the executive office of our nation intends to reallocate funds from FEMA to other uses, funds that we desperately need right now in our state, and will not be getting. News that the federal aid package approved for Iowa was too small, and included no aid to homeowners or farmers, the very people who suffered the most damage. News that unemployment here took another big bump as a result of the storm damage. News that elsewhere in the Midwest, racial protest rages on and has cost people their lives. 

It's a lot of layers. Layers of hardship, pressed down with more on top, and no sign of it ending soon. It makes me reconsider that perhaps we don't want to keep an eye on it anymore, and that it would be better to ride this (the storm, the country's political crises, the economy, the pandemic) out in the aforementioned basement, dusty Christmas decorations and cans of green beans be damned. But that would also be sinking beneath the acreage of all this flattening, all these suffocating layers. That seems as though it might be fatal, no matter how tired and pained we might be. Unlike the country rube, I am plenty scared of the flattened landscape of my state, my country, my people. But I will continue to keep an unflinching eye on it, even so. I may not be able to prevent it by keeping watch, but I will be witness, and that is often how one finds the fortitude to stand back up again. 

Some Things A Dumb White Lady Learned on Instagram

Me. I'm the Dumb White Lady. Learning new things on Instagram.

I know my voice as a relatively sheltered, middle-class, middle-aged white woman is not a relevant one to black folks. Most of the dozens I follow on Instagram are influencers, have thousands of followers, and don't need my opinion or my support to elevate their voices. That's really not where I can contribute. 

On the other hand, I am, in my dumb-white-ladyness, well versed in the dumbness of other white ladies. And I have to say to my fellow kind: you have all lost your damn minds. 

Let me start at the beginning. 

I'm on Instagram. I myself post mostly about garden stuff there, but not regularly. I don't have a huge amount of followers; I am definitely not an influencer. I don't have my blog-connected-to-the-FB-connected-to-the-'Gram-connected-to-the-Twitter-machine. Not because I don't know how, but because I don't care. I don't have a unified personal brand or whatever they're calling it these days, and if I did it would probably be "haphazard hootenanny of anxiety." Besides, my social media accounts aren't for gaining followers.

The purpose of Instagram for me? A happy place with pretty pictures. Yep. When my whole day has gone to shit in face mask sweats and work emails and unexpected bills and sullen smelly teenage boys-- then I go to Instagram to look at photos that afford me a little free escapism. I look at pictures of baby cows, and castles in Scotland, and watch videos of Sir Patrick Stewart reading sonnets, and Stanley Tucci making quarantine cocktails. The Tooch making drinks, y'all. Some days you just need that kind of smooth in your life. 

I follow a lot of accounts, many of them by women or about women or that appeal to women. There are a whole lot of flower farmers, houseplant enthusiasts, lifestyle magazines, National Parks, public gardens, travel bloggers, artists, actors, and photographers I follow because I admire their work, their creativity, or the thoughts, things, and places they share. 

But I realize, like I once thought any rational person should, that Instagram is composed of real women with real lives, which are not always perfect, or pretty. Women I follow post surprisingly vulnerable narratives on their public Instagram accounts along with all those beautiful images. About struggles with eating disorders. About struggling to keep a small business afloat. About struggling with infertility. About struggling with a seriously ill child, a death in the family, mental health, addiction, crop failures, job losses, health problems, sick pets. It's all in there. The struggles. 

That's because, even if I'm following some account for the luminous photos of flowers or the mouth-watering dessert recipes, the platform belongs to that person. It's their narrative. If they need to interrupt houseplant posts to talk about the fact their favorite cat just died, that's something that they can do. It's their story. They get to tell it on their platform. They don't owe me a certain narrative just because I expect it. Stories change all the time. That's how life is for everybody. 

Or at least, I naively assumed that was understood widely, among, you know. Decent humans. I thought that NO ONE would, for example, comment on an Instagram post, saying, "you know, I follow this account for the beautiful flowers, but if you're going to keep mooning on about your miscarriage, you can count me out." Right? No one would say that. No one in their right mind would say that because that would mean they are an incredibly self-involved, rude, and miserable cow. 

Did that paragraph up-hill from this one, with the (hopefully fictional) example about the miscarriage, make you gasp a little in outrage that someone could be so cruel? And yet here we are, doing essentially the same thing in the context of the homicide of a black man-- white women being incredibly self-involved, rude, and miserable cows. 

A few weeks ago, African Americans saw a black man's life snuffed out-- a man who could have been their son, their brother, their daddy, and who, by the way, WAS a son, a brother, and a daddy. The act itself was sickening in its own right. The fact that it was just another horrifying death in a long, deep history of racism...well, that's just heavy. Heavy as lead. Heavy beyond people's ability to bear. 

It is an enormous loss. It is a trauma inflicted not only on that man's family, but on a group of people as a whole. Black Americans are rightfully aggrieved and outraged. That grief and outrage triggered protests around the world, some of them peaceful, and some aggravated by police violence, looting, and outside agitators. It sparked what we are in the middle of right now, a national conversation about how we can address our country's legacy of racism. 

On Instagram, lots of accounts, both organizational and personal, were trying to figure out how to enter this conversation. Some wanted to acknowledge people's pain. Some wanted to offer comfort. Some wanted to make clear that they were an ally. Some wanted to help in any way they could. On Instagram and elsewhere, this took the form of efforts like Blackout Tuesday, which was an attempt to express solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, to express being an ally in the search for racial justice. Accounts from lifestyle magazines to baking bloggers joined in. Some didn't, for reasons that were also about being an ally, and out of concern for keyboard activism (I was one of those).

The reaction of white ladies blew me away. Especially on the Instagram accounts that were owned by other white women. It's as if they expected, at some level, for the conversation to remain exclusive of all that (clutches pearls) unpleasantness. 

"Unfollow." 

"You should stick to cooking. No politics." 

"I'll unfollow if I have to. I don't come here for this crap."

"I'm done here for good if this is going to be a regular topic" 

Apparently the blondest, lipstick-wearingest, Jesus-fearingest, fur-baby spoiling, front-door decor obsessed, white woman is sweet as she can be, until you sully the perfection of her social media days with some else's truth. How dare you interrupt her quest for the perfect frosé recipe with anything that might make her feel uncomfy on her thoughtfully curated comfy couch? Especially, especially, especially, if the person posting this truth is another white woman herself. I mean. The nerve. 

If you can't keep the topic to puppies and (non-LGTBQ+) rainbows, they warn, they are leaving, with a capital 'L', with a flounce and a nose in the air. As if their very presence was what made someone else's story valid. As if their departure signified how wrong someone else's story must be. As if they have the right to approve of narratives that don't belong to them. 

Let me point out again: that's how they were behaving on Instagram accounts belonging to other white women. Not on the accounts of black women (as far as I know, though frankly I would not be at all surprised). I had to sit with this awhile. It was hard for me to understand. First, it seemed cowardly. And it is. Clearly, these women calculate where they can get away with spilling the acid of their disapproval.

They expect the world to be a white space for them. All their interests, be it baking, or home decor, or world travel, or pretty pictures of their favorite flowers, are supposed to be enjoyed in a space where other people's stories cannot intrude, especially if they are unpleasant, and especially if they make white women out to be at all complicit in that unpleasantness. How threatening it must be for them to have other white women validating the voices of black experience. Even if we are (and we most certainly are) stumbling around and getting it wrong and doing all sorts of dumb white lady stuff, the fact that we are trying (however badly) to hear what black people are telling us, threatens the other white ladies in the room, who just assumed that everyone in the (white) club understood the unspoken rules. It threatens them a lot. 

That's why they need to dominate the narrative everywhere they go. Not just in their own space, but in other people's as well. Black people's most certainly. But also by extension any white woman who would use her platform in alliance with black people. 

It's not a good look, white ladies. Announcing your departure from someone else's space like You Are the Queen of All That, pretty much proves every point ever made about white fragility. And if a fellow dumb white lady can (now, finally) see that, it outlines for those of us who are trying to be allies where the work needs to be done. It lets us know when we need to smack you like a Lutheran mom in church on Sunday. Be quiet; someone else is speaking. And it isn't all about you. 

Nest

I had the photo and the title of this post knocking about my head for weeks while the global pandemic barged full force into our lives in the U.S. "Nest" evokes home, rest, familial love, nurture, and shelter-- all comforting notions that were crushed like an eggshell this month.

I've been doing my real world day job since March 18 from this desk in the front room/library.  I've always had this set-up, and throughout my adult working life I've been able to work from home, sometimes as a necessity (sick kids, weather cancellations) and sometimes as a sanity saving measure (bullpen newsrooms are not known for their calm and quiet atmosphere). When I freelanced, it was my only office.

But this is different. This is not "I'm working from home because I don't have my shit together as single mom," which, if I am honest, is exactly the reason why I worked from home in the past. It was just me, struggling to get through a day, a week, a month in which my deadlines at work coincided all too neatly with migraines (mine), ear infections (the kids), and a complete lack of clean socks (everybody).

Now, it's no longer one of the few luxuries afforded two-bit freelancers; it's required by the situation, required by this all-obliterating concern, the global pandemic.

I work in communications for a government entity, and so I've been marinating in the grim details of the coronavirus pandemic well before it was officially named one. Just that, the details and communicating them, are draining, let alone confronting it as a patient or a health care provider. Terror, even in its mildest forms, is exhausting.


It's no longer just me doing work from home while I sort out my personal chaos; now work is living at my place while the world sorts out its chaos. I realize that if this is the only way in which I'm inconvenienced by the situation, I'm lucky indeed. But it took me a while to recognize the distinction, and the way it affected me. I couldn't understand why overnight I seemed to be unable to move from my end of the sofa for hours on end, why I seemed to stub my toe on doorways I've traversed for nearly a decade, why I seemed so utterly disoriented in my own space. I have been wanting to sleep all the time. I want doors closed. I want to eat warm, buttery carbohydrates and drink slightly more wine than is rationally good for me. I want, for god's sake, a warm blanket to hug at all times, like an insecure child.

The difference between the comfort I take in domestic life and the outside world has always been distinct in my mind, a firmly defined "in-here" versus the whole wide "out-there." Like many middle class Americans, I've had the privilege of a breezy, put-a-bird-on-it brand of domesticity, subject to new toss pillows, arty pretensions, and a fresh coat of paint when I get bored. And while I still think aesthetics are important, they aren't the whole, true story of our homes.

I think of that cardinal's nest I photographed a few springs ago. Domestic life is a nebulous one, made up the bits and pieces that we find emotional value in and collect around ourselves; much like a bird assembles sticks, tufts of grass, bits of leaves, and shed animal fur into a soft inner lining to cushion her eggs. Feathering the nest is a comfortable metaphor, but incomplete, made for softer times than these.

The fragile bowl of bare flesh that is a nest of young hatchlings is just as much "out there" under the wide world's sky as it is a snug scoop of "in here." Ornithologists estimate that the mortality rate of baby songbirds is one in three. They drown, freeze, fall, or are consumed by disease and predators. Their survival to adulthood is achieved through a delicate, infinite number of interconnected factors-- eons of evolution, the weather, the availability of food that season, the experience of the mating pair, the healthy balance of the local ecosystem. How young birds come to exist at all is either a miraculous accident or an accidental miracle.

It's how all nests exist, really. That's how a bat virus in a Chinese city we've never even heard of can be the reason all our fragilities are exposed-- as a species, as a society, as a body politic. That's how I bake bread and tend seedling cauliflowers and wear running pants while the days run together. I am experiencing both at once, a miraculous accident and an accidental miracle. I feel just as vulnerable and blind as any baby bird, and yet, here is this nest, looking and feeling for all the world like it always has.

I don't know what to make of it, yet, or whether it makes my nest less valuable, or more so. I like to think more valuable, just because I now know it to be less safe than I ever imagined. How does that make any sense?

Trees I Have Loved

I am not a January person.

Living in the Midwest, January means the the arrival of truly cold weather and the ice, snow, and bad roads that go with it. I joke that I must be part bear, because hibernation until about April or so seems far more attractive to me than scraping the windshield of my Subaru, crunching down the snow-packed roads to work, and hoping to warm my bone marrow drinking pots of tea in my windowless office.

The hibernation bit is probably not so much a joke as a strong tendency to seasonal blues and depressions. I found out a few years ago that my body is terrible about maintaining enough Vitamin D levels to keep me, well, sane enough to function during the dark winter months. Knowing that and supplements have helped.

So has lowering my expectations. Not in a defeatist sort of way, but acknowledging that I am not at my best in January, and that maybe some forms of hibernation are not only okay, but a good idea. Recent interest in the Danish concept of "hygge," which I think Americans have culturally translated to mean "fireplaces, warm socks, and hot cocoa?" Definitely a good idea. Going back to the actual roots of the word, which mean something like "courage, comfort and joy?" For Pete's sake, sign me up for all three.

In the last year or two my interest in all things green and growing has intensified, and so I've also attempted to embrace the concept of hibernation in that cycle of plant-life sense too-- it's not a season of death, or nothingness. It's a season of necessary rest. I suspect that humans are not as immune to the cycle of seasons as we think, and that winter is the time for me to give in to what my body is pushing me to do--sleep a little more, keep my thoughts and perspective inward so that when the time is right, I have the energy to flourish.

It makes me think of trees. They cycle through periods of necessary rest so that they can flourish later. Their life spans in some ways are similar to we humans; we relate to them in that way. But they also spend their life rooted to one spot, achieve immense size both above and under the earth, and age often through generations of humans. Trees are about as monumental and immortal of a living thing as we'll ever be able to know. I see them as a metaphor for a larger truth about existence that we can't grasp with our small minds. Those are the sorts of things I think about, while hibernating in January (and waiting to write about them until February). It also makes me think about the trees in my life which have brought me "courage, comfort, and joy."

Stock Image

Like my sweet gum tree. It grew right outside the window of my bedroom in a little ranch house in southern Missouri where I was a small child. I thought that because it was outside my bedroom window, it was "my" tree. And maybe the little girl me meant that in terms of possession, but I like to think of it as the first real friendship I had with a tree. It was young, and so was I, and so we understood each other the way childhood friends do. Every September and October it filtered sunlight into my room in dancing bits of fiery yellow-gold and purple. When playing outside I picked up the spiky seed balls for pretend kitchen cooking, threw them at neighbor kids, and hooked them together into improbable shapes and stacks. Sweet gum tree is a playmate I remember fondly, miss some days, and wonder what has become of it. I hope it grew up, like I did. I hope it belongs to another little person looking out that bedroom window.

Stock Image

If my young childhood was a sweet gum tree, my tween and early teen years were the backyard ash. It was the 70s, we lived in a duplex apartment full of harvest golds and browns in a university town in Iowa, and I was disinterested in everything life was serving up to me at that time. My parents had split, my mother was struggling to start a new job and a new life in a new state, my baby sister was SUCH a baby sister, and junior high school was SO junior high school. I was outraged that I was not allowed to go to rock concerts, and equally outraged that I was teased for playing with my sister's dolls. I did not feel like I really had anything mastered, except for climbing that tree. I think of ash trees as being the plain vanilla ice cream cone of the tree world. There are fancier ones out there, but vanilla ice cream is better than no ice cream at all. This was true. I could grasp two small lower branches and hold on, walking my rough bare feet up the bark until I could hook a knee over the first large branch, and haul myself the rest of the way up by my hands into the canopy. I often did this with a book tucked under my chin; there was a little crook that exactly fitted my behind and lower back so that I could recline and read. That tree wasn't so much a friend as a necessary shelter from long, boring, hot summers when I was too young to do anything, and too old to do anything, and too confused to know which was worse. I discovered Ivanhoe and Judy Blume and Lois Duncan and Kurt Vonnegut and How to Care for Horses (that I would never own). I hurled a copy of Little Women down to the ground when I grew impatient with it, and then felt guilty about returning it, the spine-end a little grass-stained, to the public library. I owe a debt of gratitude to that tree, for giving me the space to just be.

Magnolia was a tree at the southeast corner of my mother's house, and somewhat of a miracle. Iowa isn't exactly the place for saucer magnolias; they don't thrive in windy frigid prairie winters. And yet, she was elegant and spreading and magnificent--as if she'd relocated to the rough frontier from a garden square in Charleston and simply refused to accept that she wasn't a Southern lady anymore. She was pretty dramatic. When she bloomed we'd all go out into the yard and just stand and look at her and say, "Wow." But the porcelain pink blooms were fleeting, and fell to the grass like breaking teacups in just a few days, even fewer if we had a badly timed windy day. Her satiny leaves shaded a little green cavern of hosta, astilbe, and ferns from hot Midwestern summer sun, and the saucer of water for the birds. Altogether she struck a somewhat ridiculously romantic pose at the corner of the patio, but we loved her for it. It was the best thing about that modest house. Eventually her high maintenance ways and flair for drama caught up with her, and her demise was a hurt that I still feel when I think about her. But I do think about her, for the guts to bloom where planted, and to do it without apology in a foreign landscape.

I say hello to this crabapple nearly every time I take a walk around our neighborhood, where the houses date from the 1910s to the 1940s. It's growing on the backside of a condominium complex that used to be my husband's elementary school. The tree has likely not been there as long as the school, which was built in 1924, but still qualifies as a senior citizen of the tree community here. I am glad she survived the remodeling of the school and grounds into condominiums. I'm glad she hasn't fallen into the hands of people who deem trees like this to be "too messy" for city street trees. I love that she produces her guts out in September, so much so that her branches wobble under the strain of all the fruit. I love watching the birds clamor around her, eager to get every last bit they can before the winter freeze. It's my "way to be" tree, because it seems to understand itself, and glories in being that very thing-- a crabapple tree, the best damn crabapple tree it can be. I wish I could be half so aware of, and accepting, of myself.

I don't often name things. But when I do, it's not because I made it up. It's because they introduce themselves and tell me their name. This is Harald, the patio cedar in my back yard. My relationship with Harald (yes, that's with the second "a", probably because the house was built by a Dane, and I expect that the trees would also have picked up the Danish way of spelling) is complicated. First of all, he's not all that pretty in many ways-- his top was lopped off at some point well before I purchased the house, and so he tends to spread out in all the weird ways that conifers do when their main leader branch is lost.  He likes to snuggle a bit too close to the eaves for comfort and needs a regular pruning back so he doesn't wipe the shingles off. He sheds needles like crazy and we're forever sweeping the patio. But. He shades the table where my family and friends gather all summer. He holds aloft the string lights that make the garden so enchanting in the evening. He protects the back half of the house from the worst of the late afternoon summer sun, and the worst of the northern winter winds. He is a filtering protector of my houseplants, who get kicked out of doors for their own good every May. He has been witness to some of my worst frustrated ugly cries over the years; and the canopy to my wedding day. We grumble about Harald, we sweep up after Harald, we love him anyway. There are actual people like him in our lives, so we should be able to see and accept that best-and-worst sort of dichotomy in a tree. I think. Ask me again when he's dropping his tree schmutz into my chardonnay in July.

There are so many trees on the place my Dad calls "The Hill," that I could forgive people for overlooking the little cedar. He's cuter than Harald, but that's because my Dad keeps him groomed for a string of Christmas tree lights during the holiday season, and it explains his picture postcard shape. He's situated in a picture postcard landscape too, in the Ozark hills where my Dad lives, and where my paternal side of the family came from generations back. It would be too simple to say this landscape and that little cedar are a part of me. They are. But I also had to lose them and win them back, and that part is complicated. I reckon that is a story many people could tell, not just about trees and landscapes, but about the struggle to grow a fully functioning human heart. Maybe there are more majestic trees to symbolize that kind of stuff; but for me, a scrappy little cedar up on a rocky ridge seems just about right.

My children call this the White Tree of Gondor. It's a sycamore, beautiful in summer, but at its best in winter, when all the white branches are bare. While it's spectacular against a clear blue sky on a sunny winter day, I prefer the soft look of it against gloomy clouds and the gentle monotones of the winter landscape. It's in a difficult location, at one of the busiest intersections in town right next to the entrance of our large public university. I'm always driving past it, admiring it, and wishing it was some other place where I could walk past or around it instead of buzzing by on my way to whatever life was dishing out that day. I realized I couldn't write this blog post without getting a photo, and that a photo wouldn't happen without actually walking to it, even though that street corner isn't particularly pedestrian friendly. I ended up parking on a side street during my noon hour, crossing a bridge over the creek, stumbling a bit on the path that hadn't yet been cleared of snow. I had nothing but my car keys and my phone in my coat pocket, and knew I probably should have brought my 35mm camera but dammit, at least I was there.  I was highly aware of all the cars whooshing by. The snow on the side of the road was black with the tiredest kind of dirt. The tree, in contrast, seemed to possess its own clean quiet, even so close to the road. I gave a twig-end a polite little jiggle with my bare cold hand, like a hand shake. Close up, the bark was even more subtle and beautiful, with markings that can't be seen in a speeding car.

January is like that stumbling walk to the corner just for the sake of seeing a tree that I love--inconvenient, incompletely planned, cold, and I hate to admit it-- necessary for the sake of its own discoveries. I'm still working that concept out in more detail, but intend to revisit it next year when I need to. And, it being January and all, I know I'll need to. Until then.

Acts of Rebellion

I grew up believing that acts of rebellion were large and spectacular and often involved young, extremely idealistic people who smelled like patchouli, belonged to "movements" and crowded public streets to chant and wave signs. I also knew that it often involved violence and destruction. The 1960s were just beginning to hit the history books when I was in high school, and those pages showed things like the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức in Vietnam and U.S. cities that convulsed with rage during the "long hot summer of '67."

That, paired with my upbringing, which insisted that I be polite, quiet, cooperative, responsible, and well-behaved, meant that rebellion didn't fit my or anybody else's idea of who I was then.

Now at 51, I'm a whole lot less enchanted with cooperative and well-behaved, but I'm still mostly quiet. Patchouli is one of the worst smells in the world to me, and it's really not in my character to march about with signs and shout about injustice. To be clear, I'm not criticizing those things in other people (well, except for the patchouli. I'm going to criticize that no matter what.)

It's just that my introversion and quiet make me a bad bet for those loud, crowded, and strident demonstrations of resistance. On the other hand, doing nothing is not an option for me in these turbulent, frightening times. Pretending everything is okay is a luxury increasingly fewer people have. Pretending everything is okay is exhausting to an even half-aware soul. Pretending that everything is okay is giving away my own power in situations where what I really want is change.

I decided that my definition of rebellion needed some reframing.

Which is why the photo accompanying this blog post is of my kitchen compost bin. It's an old lidded enamel container that sits to the right of my kitchen sink, and it's where I throw all our plant- and paper-based refuse.

It was a new practice as of this year, to reduce the amount of food waste going to the landfill, to provide fertilizer for our small backyard vegetable garden, and to create a small but self-supporting environmental circle between our table and the soil.

So was buying cotton mesh produce bags for carrying home fresh produce from the grocery (we already use cloth grocery bags), and my switching to solid bar shampoo instead of using bottled, to reduce the amount of plastic our household consumes.

So was turning over a little extra territory in our yard this year, expanding what is already a Monarch Way Station, to continue providing habitat for pollinators-- not just monarchs but other butterflies, moths, bees, and wasps that are so vital to the production of the foods we eat.

So was continuing our experiment in vegetable growing this year, trying out carrots, collard greens, Brussels sprouts, and asparagus for the first time.

In the context of these times, I believe them to be acts of rebellion. Not the sign-waving, marching-down-the-street kind, but the kind that reflects upon one's own behavior, and quietly resolves to do things differently. Differently enough that it subverts the status quo.

Composting is a rebellion against waste.

Reducing my plastic use, even a little bit, is a rebellion against the kind of consumerism that encourages convenience at the expense of the environment.

Planting vegetables and eating what I grow is a rebellion against corporate agriculture, and returns control over the quality and kind of foods I eat to me.

Planting flowers instead of lawn is a rebellion against wide-spread use of the insecticides and herbicides that harm our ecosystems.

Is it perfect? Oh hell no. My zucchini crop failed spectacularly this summer, I still need to grocery shop, I can't avoid all plastic, and I'm not a big enough hippie to go into subsistence farming or veganism (or wear that danged patchouli). Is it enough? Also no. No one person is enough. Is it better than nothing? I think it is, especially if my acts of environmental rebellion, however quiet and small, are being repeated by others across my city, state, nation, and world. That's how the needle moves.

I'm not likely to rebel by protesting. I'm glad other people are out there who do a fantastic, loud, noticeable, sign-waving, yelling, First Amendment with a capital F and a capital A push-back to those who are doing harm. We need that volume right now, for the environment and a long list of other enormous concerns.

The rest of us need to bring our gifts, whatever they are, to an increasingly difficult situation. My gift is growing things, and I can use it to address the threats our environment is facing. For that, I consider myself a rebel.

Love and Ashes

A Presbyterian minister friend of mine reminded me, via her social media post, that yesterday was not only Valentine's Day, but also Ash Wednesday.

Love.

Ashes.

Love and ashes.

First the love: Valentine's Day. Ick. For the last many years, I've been a staunch Valentine's Day protestor. Ick about the sentimentality, ick about the consumerism. Ick about about the sexism, the bad chocolate, the over-priced roses, the crowded restaurants, the unhappily married people pretending, the uncoupled people feeling left out and demoralized. Ick, ick, ick. Real love is grittier than red paper lace and candy hearts. Love in real life is troubled, loud, a little insane, playing balls out and for keeps, sweating and bleeding; but also brilliant, gentle, transcending, physical, drunken with joy and laughter. There is no greeting card that can encompass that messy glory and pain.

So much for the saint's day. I'm a little better at the religious observance of ashes, but not by much. Raised as a Lutheran, I'm (very, very) familiar with the church calendar, the cycle of penitence, death, and resurrection told and retold through thousands of years of Christianity. While I have deep respect for the tradition, faith and religion no longer inhabit the same place in my heart. I did not go to church; but I also would not refuse the ashes if a priest or pastor were to offer them to me. Because the truest gospel of all, regardless of belief, is that we are all dust, and to dust we shall return. We are all marked with that failure.

Because we fail, we also fail in love. Imperfect, selfish, uninformed, misguided, frightened, jealous, distracted, exhausted, addicted, proud, irritated, angry, bored, lazy, stubborn--we all get in the way of ourselves, even with our best and highest aspirations.

Because to love is to aspire. To die is to fail. We do both, but we are rather more honest about our aspirations than our failures, even the ultimate one. For me, right now at age 50, with aspirations and failures in roughly (I hope) equal measure, it's time to reflect. I will keep my aspirations, because even though they're battered, they still sing to me when I dream, and that makes them worth keeping. But it's time to be just as honest about the failures. It is time to gather my ashes, sweep them into a pile, inventory the remains of what has burned down.

That all sounds pretty dark, doesn't it? It definitely does in comparison to our culture's current, relentlessly cheerful continuous quality improvement model. The one that says if we can only buy this one thing or stick to that diet or earn that promotion, we'll be some better more perfect version of ourselves in some sunshiny point in the future, chasing an ideal of perfectibility that is always just out of reach, on the horizon. It keeps us forever on the hook of hope and optimism, which are awfully shiny and attractive concepts, but shallow ones. They never pay off, ever, with contentment or harmony or self-knowledge, which are ultimately more satisfying, but require an honesty so brutal that it's easier to stay distracted than face it.

Instead of darkness, though, I'm finding freedom and relief, coming to terms with the failure. Realizing that it's built into the system. All systems, all things. Relationships, bodies, cultures, objects. Me. You. Everybody. That doesn't change (or excuse) the consequences. People hurt because of failures. But the acknowledgement seems to bear a certain kind of witness and power, though, like the crosses of ash on the foreheads of Christians all over the globe. We are all weak together. So now what?

New things arise from failure. That's built into the system too. It runs through our folklore and myth across cultures, from Native American legends to Christ to Brahma and Shiva. It's right there in nature too-- organisms fail and die, are subsumed into the soil that feeds the freshest blooms, the sustaining crops, the ecological chain of life. Out of the ashes of failures and death, something else is born. But we can't love-- we can't aspire-- until we see our failures with clear eyes. Label our mistakes, repair our gates, tend to the wounded, grieve our losses, sort through the rubble to find what was worthy enough to survive and use again. The hard truth is that we'll cycle through love and ashes many times and in many forms throughout our life. I'm beginning to realize that although that part is unavoidable, trying to ignore the ugly half pretty much guarantees we won't get the half we want--anyway not in any form that really sustains us.

I'm living at that transition right now, learning to fully see and account for my failures while I build something new out of the rubble. My hands are dirty, my heart is full, and I'm making little piles here and there of what to keep and what to discard. I finally see that this is the real work of a fully lived life.

Start Writing

When I worked for a newspaper, the editor-in-chief was a kind, bespectacled man, but with a sort of roll-up-your-shirtsleeves attitude toward writing. While he firmly believed good print journalism can be both literary art form and an act of service to society, he also had a small and sometimes unruly newsroom of reporters he had to herd toward a press deadline every day.

News journalism has a standard form they call the inverted pyramid; there's a lead (spelled "lede") sentence containing the most newsworthy priority piece of information. Then other important and supporting details come next. Then, background details that help flesh out a more complete picture.

My problem as a reporter was that my mind did not and does not work that way. It does a lot of sorting of small details first, and then builds a picture of an entire situation. I'm not looking at the time of day, I'm looking at the back of the clock, and noticing how all the gears turn. I'd often return to the paper after interviews, research, and events with such a disorganized swirl in my head that I'd pace the larger circle of the first floor, through the coatroom, through the front office, back through the newsroom and loop through the print shop, restlessly, trying to wrangle my lede into place mentally.

The ticking deadline clock usually caught up with me. "Start writing," Editor would say, more advice than command. And so I would know that regardless of the state of my thoughts, it was time to pour the coffee, get my ass in the chair, and get something to the copy editors before they became volatile.

While his words were primarily about meeting the demands of the news cycle, it also put a simple, two-word directive on the circular conundrum of my writing life. I want to write words that have order and meaning.  But I also depend on words to help me find order and meaning. I cannot seem to have both at once, so I'm both afraid to start (where is the meaning?), but afraid if I don't I will never find it or the right, beautiful, true words.

That conundrum has had me stuck in place for months, both professionally (I still write for a living, though not for a newspaper), and personally. I'm supposed to love this. This is supposed to be who I am. But for the longest time, writing has been an act of pacing the perimeter of the room. For the longest time, I forgot the wisdom of "start writing."

I'm trying to remember it now. I'm trying to put my finger down on a place in that circular conundrum, and write forward toward meaning, rather than trying to pluck all the right words from the swirl of chaos, both good and bad, that life presents to me.

Stay tuned. Because my ass is in the chair.

It's Complicated (Or What My Garden Has to Do with the United Nations)

The worst thing about the internet--to me, anyway--is that it reduces any issue to two sides, usually the two of them as diametrically opposed in every way possible. It's annoying as hell to me, because life isn't really like that. I'm usually interjecting in the middle of discussions, on the internet and off, "It's more complicated than that!" and wishing I had the speaking skills to explain how incredibly interrelated everything is, or can be, if you resist the urge to reduce every argument to A or B, yes or no, this or that, pro or con. In reality, everything has a lot of moving parts.

Take, for instance, my bees.

When I moved into this house in 2011, the garden was mostly weeds and broken concrete chunks, and lawn that I hated (and still hate) mowing.

Every year I've tried to add a little more to my own little piece of planet--digging into the dirt, trying to get more good things out of it. We're about at this point, as we were when this photo was taken last June:

Even six years ago there had been years of spreading alarm about the bees--honey bees, and really, all the types of bees, wasps, and other wild pollinators that support the reproduction of plant life. Many things--colony collapse, pesticide use, loss of native habitat, and climate change-- have been deemed responsible. Even with years of frantic scientific research, there is much experts still need to learn. But just like I said about internet arguments, the understanding and the solutions won't come with the simplistic generalizations, but with the hyper-specific-- learning the intricacies and details of the problem, from all the angles, with all the data we can gather at hand.

But being hyper-specific doesn't mean that I personally should become an expert entomologist, even if I could (and I can't). It just means that if I'm concerned, I believe it's my responsibility to learn as much as I can, and bring my own talents or actions to at least one aspect of the problem.

That's where my garden grows, literally and figuratively.

I can't stand generalizations, intellectually. I know I alone can't grasp any global problem presented in big gloomy simplistic weighty boulders without getting overwhelmed, anxious, and depressed. I think that's why the news is so often too much for me-- a collection of too many massive problem-boulders piled into the narrow thought-space of black/white thinking.

So I planted flowers instead. A little more every year, picking ones that extension and garden guides said that pollinators especially liked. I avoided using pesticides.

And the bees came back.

Did I single handedly rescue the planet from its bee problems? Of course not. Not even close. But here in my large front yard perennial border, bumble bees especially have made a big comeback. Left to their work, they're surprisingly gentle garden companions, and I often weed nearby while they're quite active. Honey bees too, have returned, though in worrisomely smaller numbers.

My attempts to bring bees back to my yard was a tiny thing in the grander global scale of environmental problems. But when I did that one thing, other things besides bees began to happen.

Lots of other pollinators-- flies, beetles, and wasps, most I've yet to identify-- arrived in my garden. They each have their own little niche, some with the lilies, some with the flowers that have centers, like daisies, some with the roses.

I read that letting the garden go a bit, not being so tidy, also had advantages for pollinators, so I did that, too (always looking for a good excuse to be lazy). Not only did birds show up to feast on the dried seed heads, chickadees and goldfinches, I had plant visitors that arrived from other places, and decided to stay, including Missouri primrose, joe-pye weed, and two kinds of milkweed, both asclepias tuberosa and asclepias syriaca.

Those visitors, most importantly the milkweed, were responsible for the butterflies showing up. Specifically, monarch butterflies, though others have as well, like swallowtails, sulphurs and skippers.

Monarch butterflies have had their own survival struggles, much like the bees. Now that I've got milkweed in my garden, healthy and established for the first time this summer, I've seen monarch caterpillars aplenty.  I'm thrilled, and looking into getting my garden designated a Monarch Waystation by Monarch Watch, a conservation effort supported by the University of Kansas (link HERE.)

I'd started out just wanting to help bees. I did, just a little. But when I did that that one or two things to help bees, a whole bunch of interconnected things I didn't even think about (other insects, birds, plants, and butterflies) also found habitat in my garden. That was a far more powerful effect than I was expecting. It makes me realize that "it's more complicated than that" can work both ways, positively as well as negatively, and want to do more.

By now you're probably wondering where the United Nations comes in. This is where I get to that part. It's old news that the U.S. has decided not to participate in the Paris Climate Agreement. (you can read a handy and brief explanation HERE.) As a citizen of this country, I strenuously disagree with this decision, and it's obvious many others do as well, since mayors of major cities and state governments have pledged to meet the terms of the treaty without official U.S. participation. Corporations have pledged the same. And the economy, chugging along without the say-so of our country's elected officials, has decided that the renewable energy sector is one of the fastest growing job markets globally (you can find a little background about that HERE.)

The point is this: if I, acting alone, can intend to move the needle on just one small thing (getting the bees back to my garden) and end up improving not only that but other things that I didn't even think about (birds and butterflies), think of the rippling positive consequences of the actions of 196 nations committed to the Paris Climate Agreement, as well as the citizens, companies, and non-profit groups in the U.S. that support it. That's a basis for hope, even with all the negative things heard in the news.

I'm going to take that basis for hope and run with it. In the meantime, I'm going to keep planting flowers, and spend time with all my fuzzy bees.